


take it from your grave

by explosivesky



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, background Seamonkeys, but most importantly it's gay, curses. myths. ritual sacrifice, gothic horror, it's creepy in places. that's life, monster...horror?, oh also inspired entirely by taylor swift's folklore album cover, please notice the LACK of major character death warnings. just notice that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:33:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 48,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27663431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/explosivesky/pseuds/explosivesky
Summary: I’ll never leave you, even if it’s me.Yang makes a promise in spite of fate; fate makes her regret it.Eight teenagers run away from home, bound by a duty to return for a ritual in which one of their lives will be traded for the rest of the world’s peace. At least, that’s what they’ve been led to believe since birth: Be strong, be smart, and be alone. If you are to die, it is an honor.Or maybe it’s a lie.Eight teenagers run away from home, and upon returning nine years later, they’ve broken a few too many rules to go quietly.(Blake thought she was seeing things, then. Thought she loved a girl so much she made her a god, mythologized her, created a folktale so gorgeous and enormous it’d surpass the one they actually lived in. Now she knows she wasn’t.)
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Pyrrha Nikos/Weiss Schnee
Comments: 152
Kudos: 448
Collections: Bumbleby Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello everyone! it's been awhile since i've posted, but this is my piece for the bumbleby big bang! i had the absolute PLEASURE of working with [the wonderful amber corvophobia](https://corvophobia.tumblr.com/post/635447945145286656/whatever-their-town-is-it-has-teeth-i-had-the), who has become an incredibly special person to me and i could never have completed this without her support and her stunning art. thank you SO much amber - i'm still so lucky to have been paired with you <3
> 
> this fic is incredibly far outside of my comfort zone, and i've never written anything quite like it. it was a huge undertaking for me, and i hope you enjoy it!
> 
> playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Jn6vPHh1uWgeDbjvqv6kY?si=UyCpdMvER4yEDgQ8MOgdTg)

_It’s me._

Blake’s had nightmares about receiving this exact text.

She’s had nightmares about a lot of it, actually: the mark on the inside of her wrist shifting, followed by the initial dizzying wave of relief when it’s not her - only to be immediately replaced by devastating, overwhelming agony when it’s Yang. It was a type of trauma, she’d thought. Weeks where she barely ate and cried until the sun rose and sleep never came at all. Months in a daze where words had to be repeated three times to sink in, and she fought to forget the names of everyone she’d ever met. Years of her life in fog, just like the fucking town they’d never been able to run far enough away from. 

She supposes this is why they’d always been told to stay away from each other. It’s lonely, but it protects them from the grief. Or it would’ve, if they’d listened. 

If they’d listened.

\--

(It was an accident. That’s what she calls it.

They’re locals, so of course they attend all the same schools, elementary all the way through high school. They’re good at avoiding each others’ gazes, good at passing by on opposite sides of the hall. Good at pretending the other doesn’t exist. For the first sixteen years of their lives, at least.

But something happens to Yang, and it’s kind of embarrassing for Blake to admit: she gets _hot._ Puberty hits her in a way it doesn’t hit Blake, and it’s noticeable. She starts working out, develops muscle and threat with the rest of her body. She’s confident with her skin, powerful with her fists. Her hair seems longer and blonder than ever, eyes the color of sunsets covered in clouds. And Blake finds her unbelievably, insanely beautiful. 

Her sexuality isn’t much of a question after that, and neither is Yang’s; the rumor starts floating around that the only reason she learned to box was to properly punch boys with hands stupider than their mouths, and for awhile, their black eyes become a marker for the other girls of who to avoid.

It isn’t even an unspoken rule, and so Blake can’t claim ignorance; it’s something they’d been taught their whole lives, but she catches Yang in the locker room after gym and all it takes is a split second to break it. A split second and an entire life of loneliness.

“Hey,” she says, standing by her own locker; she keeps a hand on the door as if it’s keeping her upright. Her legs might be trembling. She’s breaking decades’ worth of tradition just by opening her mouth.

It’s like neither of them have ever had a conversation before; Yang looks slowly up at her, clearly caught off-guard by the direct acknowledgment. “Uh,” she says, but Blake had her pegged right: she’s not a slave to tradition, either. “Hi?” 

“I’ve been thinking,” Blake says, which isn’t true at all but she’s about to lie her ass off for as much time as Yang’ll give her. “What if we hung out?” 

“‘Hung out’?” Yang repeats dubiously, and Blake’s emboldened to hear a note of genuine amusement underneath the hollowness. “You and me, destined to possibly kill the other? You’re bold, Belladonna.” 

“I’m bored,” Blake bites back, being someone she isn’t. Being someone she thinks Yang might like and admire: someone who isn’t afraid of what’s to come. “You can’t tell me you _aren’t._ ”

“Stuck in this town?” Yang says, and winks. “Wouldn’t dream of denying it. We have, like, three bars.”

“You’re sixteen anyway.” 

“Are you saying you wouldn’t let me take you out for a drink?”

Recognizing a blush is a strangely new experience in this context, but she pushes past it. She might die in ten years or something, so she might as well start taking risks now. “From what I’ve heard, you get into a bit of trouble.” Fuck it; she’ll toss in a compliment, too. “ _And_ throw a pretty good punch.”

It’s the first time she’s ever heard Yang laugh. “From what _I’ve_ heard,” she echoes back with a smile, “you get _out_ of a lot of trouble without punching anyone.” 

“I could teach you,” Blake says. Yang slips on her jacket, draws her hair out from under the collar. Her smile’s faded into a smirk, one half of her mouth pulled up at a corner. 

She grabs her bag, takes the few strides over to Blake, stops in front of her; _oh,_ that’s one thing Blake _hadn’t_ noticed, probably due to the lack of closeness - how _tall_ Yang’d grown. She’s sixteen and probably five-seven already, with only an inch added from her boots. 

“Is that a yes to drinks?” She asks instead, as if Blake even remembers how to say no.)

\--

She stares at Yang’s message for an hour, and only realizes she’s crying when she shifts her position and finds the collar of her shirt damp. She has four missed calls, but none of them are from Yang, and she doesn’t bother calling back. They’ll all say the same things, anyway, ask the same questions, offer the same sympathies. _Blake, it’ll be fine. We’ll get through this. Somehow._ Or worse. _Blake, you knew better. You knew this was a possibility._

It’ll be Weiss, wanting reassurance she’s okay. That she’ll still be able to go through with it. Sun, already thinking of a way out, and another in case the first one doesn’t work. A third for good measure. And Ruby. The only other person who could possibly understand what it’ll feel like to lose Yang. 

She can’t have that conversation yet. She can’t even imagine that future.

The hardwood floor is nothing, underneath her. The ceiling is melting. The darkness is a void - no, no, a mouth. A pair of arms, reaching for an embrace. Death, but if death were comforting instead of an unbreakable wall where everything she ever loved lived just on the other side.

She finally understands the appeal of a sun that never rises. If it never becomes _tomorrow_ , she’ll never have to face the acceptance of a mark she can’t see in the absence of light. If the moon stays full and the earth puts a pause on rotation, it never becomes _next week,_ and Yang never has to die. 

And she doesn’t have to be the one to kill her.

\--

(They meet in secret. Well, sort of. 

Blake’s parents, she says, are too busy and important to keep watch of her every move, and are almost constantly on business trips. And Yang’s dad, as she explains, is so fucked up from his first love leaving, his second getting sacrificed in an ancient ritual, and both of his daughters being targets for the next one that it’s all he can do to wake up in the morning. So, basically, they’re in the clear.

Yang takes her out for that drink. 

There’s a pub on the edge of town, most commonly frequented by travelers and businessmen stopping through on the train to Vale. Yang orders two Strawberry Sunrises, and winks at Blake when the bartender merely rolls his eyes, grabbing their glasses. For a second, Blake thinks of asking who she’s bribed for this kind of exception to the law, but then she sees his gaze flicker to the mark on the inside of Yang’s wrist, and she knows. 

“Look,” Yang says breezily, “if I’m gonna die, I might as well start drinking now. That way when I’m legal, I’ll already know what I like.”

“No sense in wasting time,” Blake agrees, not really in a position to talk about breaking rules. “What’s in this, anyway?” 

“Tequila.” 

“Hm.” Blake runs her finger down the menu. “Maybe I’ll try something with whiskey.” 

“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” Yang flirts, and to Blake’s embarrassment, it works immediately. “Tonight’s on me.” 

However, she’s not one to let tables turn without at least attempting to flip them back. “Hopefully not the only thing,” she answers charmingly, and Yang’s drink almost comes out of her nose instead of going down her throat. Oh, appearances, appearances; neither of them are actually what they pretend they are, in practice.

A couple hours later, and Yang’s insisting she’s only tipsy; Blake’s vehement that she isn’t drunk at all, even as she slurs over half her words. They end up strolling around town, covered by the night and the stars - the fireflies - the fairy lights wrapping up lamp posts. They pass plenty of other people, who always seem to look the other way. Ignoring the main streets gives them opportunity for a normalcy they’re never granted otherwise; browsing tiny bookshops, marking a teahouse they’d never noticed for another day; playing pretend at the window of a real-estate agency, commenting on the affordable prices of the listings. 

“I think this is the best night I’ve ever had,” Yang bursts out at the end of a giggling fit, smile glowing in her cheeks. “I didn’t know a lot about you before this, but I’ve learned one thing, at least.” 

“And what’s that?” Blake asks, inexplicably delighted by the sound of her laughter and enormously proud to have been the one who caused it. 

“You’re full of good ideas,” Yang says, and tosses an arm around her shoulder. “We should’ve been hanging out this entire time.” 

“Oh, you say that _now,_ ” Blake says, rolling her eyes; she doesn’t fight her blush, only burrows into it, accepting the pressure of Yang’s arm a bit too readily. “Wait until we’re sure one of us won’t have to kill the other.” 

Back then, it was a joke rooted in such far-off time, in such a distant place, that they both fell a little closer together and laughed.)

\--

As per tradition, they meet back in town five days before the ritual.

‘Meet’ is a bit of a loose term, though - they show up one-by-one, stumbling off airships, sneaking off trains, arriving at times they’ll never be noticed. Not that too many of the locals would glance twice, regardless - only the older ones tend to shoot them pitying looks, and even then, sometimes Blake thinks she imagines it. 

But the whispers: they’re everywhere. It’s a superstitious town, and for good reason - everything about it is soaked in suspicion and secrecy: its central families who maintain a presence, despite seeming to hate the existence of the town itself; how a single member of one of those families seems to disappear without a trace every fifty years, leaving the rest to their own varying forms of emotional lifelessness afterward; how anyone who knows what’s wrong with the town never seems able to speak a word of it. How there always seem to be a group of children who grow up with strange, matching tattoos, visible from an age far too young to be acquired normally.

After disembarking the airship and picking up her luggage, her attention briefly goes to her scroll; Ilia’s name pops up several times, as do a few others she can’t stare at too long without feeling sick. She can’t even manage to read their contents - can’t read their begging, their apologies, their determination.

So she heads to the nearest bar. She doesn’t have to worry about first impressions, or refined greetings, or being remembered at all. Nothing matters anymore. Maybe that’s one good thing - the only thing. 

The town looks the same as it always has; same stretches of budding, beautiful fields until the deep red canopy of the forest; same cloudy, looming sky; same biting chill, same threat of fog. The bell chimes as she enters; the lettering on the window’s slightly faded, and the inside is mildly empty for a Sunday afternoon, but she isn’t concerned with the patrons. It’s a bar mostly for travelers passing through on business, anyway, just on the outskirts of town. She’s been here before. She tries not to think about that.

She intends on drowning her sense of identity in several glasses of whiskey, but someone’s already beat her to it. 

“Blake Belladonna.” 

She’d recognize that blue hair anywhere, and the cocky, casual lean against the bar behind him is a classic tell, too. “Neptune.” She’s instantly on edge, waiting for his other half to come barreling into her body, slurring ideas about plans. “Where’s--?”

“You can relax,” Neptune says, and gestures to the barstool next to him. “Sun’s not here.” 

She does, but only barely; _not here_ is too vague an answer for comfort. “As in?” 

“He went to see his grandma,” he says, and looks down at the dark liquid in his glass. “She...wouldn’t believe it wasn’t him until she saw the mark herself.” 

“I’m sure she’s relieved,” she says, and for a split second, thinks about relishing in his discomfort. Thinks about standing bolder, more pointed - _I’m sure you’re relieved, too, Neptune. It’d be horrible to lose someone you love like that, wouldn’t it._

But she has no claim to those words anymore, and so she stops there. He feels it anyway. He and Sun had never believed in the finality of their breakup, and pretending otherwise now won’t be a mercy. “I’m sorry,” he says, and has the decency to meet her eyes. “Blake. I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t.” Her voice thankfully stays flat and emotionless. “I don’t want to talk about it. I want to drink.” 

“Okay.” He turns quietly back to the bar, signals the bartender for another, and one for her as well. “It’s on me.” 

Words have inverted meanings, now. Everything is about everything else. She’s looking for signs and so she’s finding them. 

No, she thinks. No, it’s on all of us.

\--

(Here’s the thing: they’d both put on a bit of an act in the beginning. Both pretended they were bigger than their burdens, that potential impending death was nothing but a single landmine in a vast field of wildflowers. They _probably_ wouldn’t step on it. They’d _probably_ be fine. They’re teenagers - they should be worrying about school, and dating, and other trite, silly things.

Except--

“Are you afraid to die?” 

Yang asks the question on a Sunday afternoon, a month after they’ve started seeing each other regularly, hanging out after school and exchanging hidden conversations between classes. She’s resting on her stomach on Blake’s bed, end of her pencil tapping against her bottom lip as she stares down at their trigonometry homework. 

“Yes,” Blake says, and doesn’t hesitate to admit it. She’d always known they’d been pretending, but she thinks they like each other a little too much now to care about shattering the illusion. “Kind of. Some days I can’t decide if I’m more afraid it’ll be me, or more afraid I’ll have to…”

“Kill one of us,” Yang finishes quietly. “Yeah. I know.” 

“Are you scared?” 

Her eyes flick up, irises a cool lavender in the glow of Blake’s lamp. She thoughtfully kicks her crossed ankles in the air behind her. “Not yet,” she says, and smiles. “Ask me again in a year.”

“Just one?” Blake mocks, nudging her shoulder. “Planning on gaining a lot of wisdom?” 

“Something like that,” Yang says, nursing a love she can’t yet predict warmly in her chest.)

\--

She’s stunningly on her way to blackout when she gets the one text that has any power over her at all. Neptune’s proved to be excellent company, as he hasn’t said a single word, only added as many of her drinks to his tab as she’s ordered. But even he can’t stop himself from glancing at the name that flashes across her screen. 

“Fuck,” she says blankly, and decides she’ll be as pathetic as she wants; she’s earned this much. She’s still losing everything. Living doesn’t mean freedom. She passes him her scroll, unlocked and face-up. “Read it - read it to me. I can’t.” 

He takes it without question or pushback, softly clears his throat. “Ruby says Yang is back.” He pauses. “That’s all.” 

She drains what’s left of the liquor in her glass, and just for good measure, takes Neptune’s and downs his, too. 

That’s where her period of grace ends - where her reality takes hold of her ankles and drags, something of a possession, a body thrown down a staircase. Because she can’t ignore Ruby. She can’t feign sole ownership of the pain of loss anymore, can’t twist it until it’s all that’s left of her like a pitiful mess of a creature. 

Ruby’s losing Yang, too. Not in the same way. But just as devastating. 

“What are you gonna do?” Neptune asks, but his voice has gone flat, detached. Like he doesn’t want to know the answer or its implications. Like he wishes he’d never met her to begin with. 

She thinks back to that first day in the locker room, her rebellious _hi,_ her false bravado. The domino effect, the ripple outwards; they’ll have words for her, in due time. 

In a way, it really is all her fault.

“Face the consequences,” she says, and slips unsteadily off her stool. She leaves her luggage; he’ll get the idea. 

He doesn’t respond at first, but just as she’s putting on her coat, says, “No, Blake,” and his tired eyes don’t move from the view of his fingerprints through the glass. “I think we’ve still got a couple days to go until we face those.”

\--

(The problem is that teenagers have a notoriously poor sense of judgment, and almost no ability to appropriately catalogue risks. 

Maybe theirs is a special circumstance anyway - maybe being born into risk skews their perceptions of it, like looking into a funhouse mirror, bones elongated and body stretched too wide. Their entire lives as a group game of Russian Roulette. 

Maybe that’s why she starts to want _more._

Breaking one rule isn’t enough, now that she knows how worth it the breaking was - she’s never been understood by someone before, never had someone to tell about a bad day, never had an embrace to collapse into. Her parents loved her, but every interaction with them was weighted down by their despair of potentially having to put her in a coffin. If there’d even be anything left of her after, that was. The specifics were murky. 

But Yang - Yang’s _different_. 

They start staying the night at each other’s houses, sneaking out in the evening, again in the morning. They break open their parents’ liquor cabinets and giggle, playing stupid games, making stupid jokes, acting like the stupid teenagers they are. Or should be. 

Blake complains about marks she gets on her assignments; Yang pretends she’ll bribe the teacher until she gets a smile out of her. Blake makes comments about boys who won’t leave her alone; Yang cracks her knuckles, jaw tight and irises almost red. And then, with her pulse hammering in her throat, Blake confides how lonely she used to be, but isn’t anymore. 

“Me too, you know,” Yang says, blush sitting prettily in her cheeks. Blake’s no longer startled to find herself pleased by the places Yang’s blood pools under her skin; flushed after a workout, bright during a fit of laughter. “I was - I have Ruby, I guess, but...I can’t be like this with her.” A pause; teeth tugging her bottom lip into her mouth, releasing with an imprint. Blake wonders what that imprint would look like on her own lip. “She’s my little sister. I’m supposed to protect her. I can’t - I - I was lonely, too.” 

It’s not often Yang stutters over her words; she’s annoyingly articulate, unless she’s lying to herself. Unless she’s hiding something. 

Blake thinks she knows exactly what that _something_ is. 

“Yang.” Her heart is everywhere at once, the room, the sky, the girl across from her. “What else?” 

Yang’s hesitant, embarrassed smile is the most beautiful thing Blake’s ever seen - the way she tucks her hair behind her ear, how it falls back into place a second later anyway - both of them sitting on the floor, backs against the bed, Yang’s knees up and Blake’s crossed, hands where anything can happen to them--

“You’re so - _annoying,_ ” Yang says, but her smile’s spreading, infectious. She’s staring determinedly ahead, arms resting over her knees, a bashful curve to her spine. “You do the _one_ thing we’re not supposed to do, and now I’m like - ugh - I don’t know!” She stops momentarily, too full of things to say and second-third-quadruple-guessing every single one of them. They’re dynamite with a fifty-fifty chance to blow and she’ll light the perfect match the minute she finds it. “It’s fucked up,” she finally settles on, cheeks and neck burning, bathing in a wildfire. “You’re so... _pretty._ ” 

The sun may as well be collapsing inward, swallowing them whole. There are too many devils hidden in the details - demons and monsters lurking in the fine print - no one’s ever called her pretty without wanting something from her in return. Blake signs her heart like a contract, gives it away in an instant. 

Yang’s room is a shade of pale yellow with a purple accent wall so vivid it’d make any interior designer faint, a similar color to the bandana she sometimes wore tied around her thigh, or above her boot, or over her hair if she was working on her bike. They’d only painted it recently; she remembers the day as a title under a sample color card, pressed into a bookmark. _Why this one?_ she’d asked, because it looked more like her than Yang.

That’d been the reason. _You love it,_ Yang had said, which was a confession all on its own. 

She’s not as subtle with her emotions as she likes to think she is, and that doesn’t start now. 

Blake rests her cheek in her hand, head tilted towards Yang, her own grin probably bordering on maniacal; she’s sure she looks insane. Admitting a crush will do that to you, especially when it’s reciprocated. Especially when it’s reciprocated by the one person stunning enough to get anything she wants, if only she’d think to ask for it.

“I’m pretty, huh?” Blake repeats, laughter bubbling in her voice; she’s never been so happy in her life. They’ve switched their usual positions, with Yang flustered and Blake bold. Some risks are worth it; she’ll face them again, and again, and again. Maybe it’s confirmation bias, and she’s seeing what she wants to see without the consequences. Maybe she’s sixteen and doesn’t care.

“Stop laughing, bitch,” Yang says, and stretches a hand over to the curve of her knee, resting; there’s never been a sense more important than touch. Testing waters, creating currents; they’re both smiling like idiotic fools. “Like you don’t already _know_ you’re the prettiest girl in this entire town.” 

“No, that’s you,” Blake says, sure that Yang’s lifeline is blazing like a brand into her skin. “I love a compliment, though. Keep them coming.” 

“It wasn’t a compliment. The bar is extremely low.” 

“Oh, is that right?” 

“Yep. Super low.”

“How low?”

“On the ground,” Yang says, poorly straight-faced. “My options are slim, but you’re better than nothing, I suppose.” 

“Well now that I’ve been so successfully seduced,” Blake says, and rests her own hand over the back of Yang’s; she turns it over naturally, lets their fingers intertwine. There’s a shared, shy glance down, and back up - not everything unsaid needs to be, but it’s still nice to hear. “I think you’re beautiful too, you know.”

“Oh, Belladonna,” Yang says, and her eye-roll doesn’t diminish the genuinity of her smile. “ _That’s_ been obvious since the moment you saw me in a sports bra and decided you _had_ to break a thousand year-old rule to talk to me.”

There’s no escaping _that_ strike; _boom,_ goes the dynamite. “Okay, that is _not_ why--” 

“I don’t care,” Yang interrupts with breathless laughter, and abruptly shifts her position, releasing Blake’s hand to turn on her knees, face her a little more head-on. She’s clearly hit her limit on bashfulness, diving straight past any in-betweens for impatience. “Kiss me.” 

Her hair’s fallen over her shoulders, golden like it holds its own glow; her eyes are the color Blake’s soul feels, if it could take up a brush and paint. And in spite of her muscle definition - her arms, her shoulders, the faint outline of her stomach - her strong thighs, the thickness of her knuckles - everything about her looks soft. 

Especially her lips. That’s a theory she should test - run a thumb over the bottom one, trace the lines--

“Forget it,” Yang murmurs, and takes Blake’s chin in her hand like she’s done this before, knows exactly where to touch, what to give, when to take. “ _I’ll_ do it.” 

Maybe she _has_ done this before, or maybe she just knows Blake - catalogued from sight alone, or the occasional brush of shoulders, or when they wake up too close together, pretending not to stare at each others’ mouths. 

There’s none of that pretense now, none of those watchtowers, nothing keeping them at a distance - Yang kisses her like she was born for it - forget saving the world, forget sacrificial rituals; if either of them were created for anything, it was this - heart between her lips, Yang’s hand on her thigh, power of a black hole between them--

She hunts for details, blooms them into explanations: oh, it shouldn’t be so dramatic, a first kiss - except that she’s acutely aware of it being something she never should’ve allowed herself at all. If she’d listened to the rules, if she’d heeded every warning - she’d have kept them safe, but at the cost of possibility. At the cost of potential, of the concept of _future,_ something she never thought she’d get anyway. 

Here’s the truth she comes to, kissing Yang: through no fault of her own, she was chosen to protect the world or some shit. And that meant living without connection - like a ghost - an apparition - something seen in shadows, blinking into mirrors. Existing where she couldn’t hurt anyone except herself. 

Yang slips her tongue across Blake’s bottom lip, shifting so close she’s almost on her lap. One of her hands is curled through the hair at the back of Blake’s head. It’s like she’s looking for space she hasn’t inhabited yet, finding a way in. Engulfing. Consuming. And far, far beyond their control.

“God,” Yang whispers briefly between kisses. “If this - stupid fucking curse was good for anything, it’s this.” Hotter now, brighter. She may as well be ash. “You feel that, don’t you?” 

“Always,” Blake finally admits, longing and certainty so deep it has nowhere else to go but out. She wraps her arms snugly around Yang’s waist as Yang straddles her, and then flame, licking. “Always. Since the moment I first saw you.”

Yang smiles against her mouth. “Yeah,” she murmurs, pulling back, and their eyes connect in the momentary silence. “Me, too.” 

Sometimes, Blake wants to believe, the world can be saved in other ways. 

Sometimes there can be enough purpose in peace.)

\--

Yang hadn’t been surprised to see the flower blooming on her wrist.

Bad luck of the draw - that’s what it’s supposed to be. But she’d always felt _different,_ somehow, like teetering on the edge of her own destruction; blood too hot, skin too thick, something inside of her waiting to expand at the melting point. Power, but a power that wanted her dead. 

She always knew it’d get its way. 

She stares down at the tattoo, poking out from underneath the sleeve of her sweater. It’d started out as a bud - just a small, unassuming shape, easy enough to ignore and simple enough to dismiss in a conversation. _My sister has a matching one. I got it with an ex-girlfriend. Family heirloom._

It’s the likeness of a flower that grows all around their town, vast fields of it marking their borders: _bellweed._ And - as legend has it - it only grows where the dead are buried and decomposing, enriching the soil. It’s supposed to be some kind of metaphor, apparently: _Beautiful things come from sacrifice,_ Qrow told her once, halfway through his tenth drink of the day. 

And after her arm - after Blake - she felt like the perfect ground to birth a flower that relied on corpses.

So it hadn’t come as a shock to see it spread, bloom, become. It had hurt anyway. 

But what had hurt the most was that she had to watch it bloom alone.

\--

(For awhile, Yang wonders if their curse is a blessing in disguise. Well, maybe she doesn’t go _that_ far - the ritual itself in like ten years is probably gonna suck - but she has no other explanation for Blake. For Ruby. 

She closes her eyes, sees the threads that bind them, gossamer and gold. In theory, she stood a chance against Blake; they had no reason to interact outside of one fateful day many years in their future. But Ruby - Ruby’s her little sister. There’s no escaping that love, that devotion. 

And in reality, she couldn’t escape Blake, either. Their world is full of forces - dictating how they live their lives and when they end them, how they build their walls and who they let through their doors - but what draws her to Blake is much the same: something uncontrollable, magnetised; not a choice but an instinct. It’s Blake, and it always has been, ever since they first caught sight of each other across a playground in elementary school and stared. 

“I remember that,” Blake says, charmed. They’re walking through the park, boots crunching on leaves and arms bumping between them. They aren’t brave enough to take each others’ hands in public yet. “But I couldn’t tell you why.”

“Yeah,” Yang says, gaze lingering idly on a few children playing in the trees, chasing each other with long sticks. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to you, and I just - I remember being disappointed when I saw you, because you looked like someone I wanted to be friends with.” 

Blake smiles, tinged bittersweet. “I remember thinking you looked sad,” she says, and the way their pinkies brush is no accident. “Like me.” 

“I didn’t feel like that with anyone else,” Yang continues, because Blake’s comment doesn’t need any verification for the both of them to know it was true. “I saw Weiss, and Pyrrha, and Sun - all of them - and I didn’t feel...the way I felt wasn’t the same.” 

They stroll on in silence for a moment; the trees are in hues of yellows and reds around them, the fall air holding onto a hint of bite. The kids are laughing now, yelling about the rules of their made-up game. It’s so inconsequential and meaningless and everything they weren’t allowed to indulge in.

When Yang was a child, her imaginary games involved Summer coming back with Raven in tow and scrubbing the mark off on her wrist with soap and water. 

“It’s strange,” Blake says, voicing a thought Yang hadn’t quite managed to touch on. “You’d think fate would’ve been a little smarter about it.” 

“You’d think,” Yang repeats wryly. “Couldn’t I have been into, like - I don’t know, name a girl. I can’t think of any.” 

“Nora,” Blake supplies. 

“Nora, sure.” 

“I know,” she says. “I’m bisexual. I had twice the options and it still had to be you.”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Yang says, feigning earnestness. “I apologize for my incredibly good looks, vast intelligence, and overflowing charisma. You didn’t stand a chance.” 

“Oh, I see,” Blake replies, and smiles in a way that signals a devastating blow is coming. “Fate _did_ have a plan. It was for me to witness your ego in this exact moment and dump you on the spot.” 

That’s a moment for mockery; Yang drapes an arm around her shoulder, presses close, mouth next her ear. “You’re lucky I’m into bitches, Belladonna.” 

“Shut up,” Blake snickers, but doesn’t shove her off; she wouldn’t push Yang away if her life depended on it. She can’t imagine ever doing that. “Me being a bitch ranks extremely high on your list of reasons why I’m hot.” 

“Maybe so.”

“I’ve read it, Yang. It’s, like, number three.” 

“Yeah, right underneath your ass and pu--” 

“If you finish that sentence,” she interrupts, and grasps Yang’s jaw in her right hand, smushing her cheeks together, “I’ll make sure you never see either of those things.” Yang manages some kind of a noise halfway between a protest and a laugh that has Blake’s eyes rolling. “You’re so stupid.”

“I think you mean hilarious,” Yang says as Blake releases her face. They’re deeper into the park now, where it’s more woods than walkways, solitary streetlamps quietly beginning to flicker on. She keeps her arm settled comfortably around Blake’s shoulders, freed from view with her grey hood over her hair. The leather jacket she’s wearing over her hoodie is worn, and Blake sinks into the softness of it, arms crossed over her own body.

“Egotistical.” 

“That’s on _your_ list.” 

“No, I like your _confidence,_ ” Blake replies, her boots crunching over the fall leaves; it’s a wonderful beat to the sound of Yang’s laugh. “When it turns to arrogance, though…”

“That’s your limit,” Yang finishes somberly. “Right, sure. But Blake, I just, like - I can’t help being so incredible. That’s not _my_ fault. Even the gods were like, ‘she’s too powerful, we have to get rid of her.’” 

“Shut _up,_ ” Blake repeats, but the way she’s giggling ruins the illusion of the command. She’d listen to Yang make dumb jokes forever, if she were allowed. If they both were.

And then Yang’s steps fall slower, in time with her mouth, and she knows where Blake’s head has gone, as if she were reading her mind - as if they were one, and whatever thoughts they had were shared - as if their deal with fate extended past sacrifice, gave them a look into the other’s soul. 

It’s just the two of them standing still on the cobblestone path, Blake looking like something out of a dream with her cream sweater over a red-and-purple flannel, collar folded over the neck, dark blue jeans rolled at the ankles; she’s wearing boots, too, giving her a vital few inches as to not be towered over by Yang’s natural height. 

Yang wonders how they appear to other people. If they seem like friends, if they seem like more - if they seem inevitable. If they seem sixteen, or if they’re weighed down with something much, much older. 

They’re facing each other, recognizing a moment before it washes over them; Yang reaches out her left hand, gently tangles their fingers together. 

“Ask me,” she says softly. 

There’s no need for clarification. They understand each other more than they understand themselves, sometimes, store the same memories in the same photo album. Blake knows. She always knows. 

“Are you scared to die?” 

And this time, Yang has an answer. 

“No,” she says, and cups Blake’s cheek with her other hand, thumb stroking over her bottom lip. “The only thing I’m afraid of is being without you.” 

The wind in the trees, Blake’s tiny hitch of breath - their eyes, darting to their mouths and back; the world on its axis, a sense vertigo - they’re falling closer, bodies turning into slopes; curve of the neck, dip of the head, all that glitters is gold--

It’s always different when they kiss. There’s so much pouring out of her and nowhere it’s coming from; they’ve been together for six months but sometimes she’s so nostalgic she wants to wear her love like a blanket, or so warm she opens her heart like a house. Six months and a hundred years, she thinks, trying to explain the thread tangled up in her hands, trying to explain her ache and pain and desire and tenderness. 

“Me too,” Blake whispers, resting their foreheads together. “That’s the only thing I’m afraid of, too. Being without you. I don’t know how I - what I did before you.” 

“You’ll never have to,” Yang says, making a promise that isn’t hers to keep. “I’ll never leave you. Even if it’s me.” 

“You can’t promise that.” Blake’s voice is unsteady now, grip tight on Yang’s shoulder, holding her closer as if she’s afraid she’ll be torn away for even daring to tempt fate otherwise. 

“You can’t stop me.” 

It’s a bold statement, but Yang’s certainty doesn’t just come from delusions of grandeur, or the naive belief that love conquers all - no, no; it’s more complex than that, a clarity underneath a spiderweb of chaos, a feeling she swears belongs to time itself.

Fate had a hand in Blake, too.

And fate, Yang wants to believe, wouldn’t lock its most intricate creation in a cage just to watch it die.)

\--

“Yang.”

Blake’s voice doesn’t have a chance to catch her off-guard; Yang’s been able to feel her presence ever since they were kids, like she’s got an added sense for it. She knows Blake’s the same way, remembers all the time they spent finding each other’s eyes in crowds, hiding around corners, behind doors, in closets. Remembers _I know you’re there, Yang._ Remembers reaching for Blake in a pitch black room and finding her mouth perfectly. 

The wind picks up, brushing her hair against her cheek. The sun glitters over the water as it sets. She’d call it beautiful if the world hadn’t rid itself of all pretty things the minute the mark on her skin shifted. 

That’s something people get wrong about death, she thinks. It’s not like the universe suddenly becomes miraculous as soon as you’re told you’ll no longer be allowed to live in it. No, no; in actuality, beauty becomes narrow, becomes focused, becomes truth. 

And the truth is that the only beautiful thing left is standing behind her. 

She turns around, and the breath she lets out is the same one she’s been holding since they broke up - the same oxygen she’d stolen from Blake’s lungs and absorbed into her blood during their last kiss, filtered and reformed and finally exhaled. That’s all she feels of herself, now; the parts of her that are made of other people, the traits she adopted out of love for them. Ruby’s hope, spitting in the face of utter hopelessness. Sun’s determination against the force that controls him, controls them all. Weiss’s defiance, tired of her entire life dictated down to her own voice, and what she uses it for. 

And Blake. Blake’s everything, really; her sense of justice, her furious passion, her endless drive. Her dry wit, biting commentary, sharp sense of humor. How breathlessly she laughs when a joke hits where she doesn’t expect it. The way her nose crinkles when her smile’s wide. Her habit of playing with her hair, looping a curl around her finger before letting it go.

“Blake,” she says, finding her more beautiful than ever in her black high-waisted skinny jeans, grey cropped t-shirt, and oversized jacket - it’s fleece-lined, half-umber and half-black, divided diagonally by two white lines with a tribal pattern in the middle. She always had the best sense of style between the two of them. “Hi.” 

Oh, here’s where the memories begin. Begin and never stop. This entire town’s full of them.

“Hi,” Blake says, chewing nervously on her lip. She’s about to break. All of them are. Yang can’t hold it against her, but can’t hold her together, either. Some things aren’t fair like that. “Ruby texted me that you were back, and I - I thought you might be here.” 

“You were right,” Yang murmurs, and feels the cool metal of arm like it’s newly attached, rather than years old. “You found me.” 

_Did I?_ Blake wants to ask, wants to tug at the cloth of her t-shirt until it rips, wants to stain it with the blood she swears she’ll lose when her heart dies with Yang. _Did I find you, or did I find what’s left?_

As if being able to hear her internal monologue, Yang tilts her head to the side, an unconscious tic - it’d always been her way of figuring Blake out. Like if she shifted her angle, she’d find what wasn’t revealed directly. Under a certain slant of light. 

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it,” she says, voice still low, almost methodically unwrapping words. “That it’s still me.” 

“Yes,” Blake whispers, sound lost in her throat. “It’s been five years.” 

“I know.” Yang crooks the corner of her mouth, humorless. “Time flies when your fate is predetermined.” 

It’s that, more than anything else, that breaks Blake immediately. A joke. A stupid, simple joke, as if it’s at all possible to laugh at their situation - as if the day they’ve dreaded their entire lives has come and gone, and Blake should be celebrating her freedom, her future, her possibilities - as if she should be _laughing_ at _jokes._

Except that she’d already poured all of that into the woman standing in front of her, who wouldn’t be alive to give it back. 

Tears must be pouring down her face, because there’s no other explanation for Yang’s careful closeness; there are still too many towering walls, too many unspoken apologies. But she’s here, anyway, barely inches from Blake with a hand outstretched and hovering over her elbow. 

“Please,” she begs gently, and her expression has gone soft, delicate, like it might shatter at any moment into something she isn’t ready to reveal - not even to herself. “Please, don’t.” 

It isn’t fair of Blake to throw herself at Yang and cry for a life she’ll never get to live when Yang’s the one sacrificing it; she’s aware of this and it doesn’t change a thing. Words start piling on the tip of her tongue, vying to be right. _Love_ _can make you selfish._ No, that’s cliche. _I read a poem._ No. She has her own words. Yang deserves that much. _Love isn’t about accepting the mortality of the person you love; it’s about creating a world where you both can live forever._

“I love you,” Blake says, breath stuttering with every letter. What we want to say is never as good as what actually leaves our mouths. “Yang, I--” 

“Stop.” She doesn’t step back, but her hand drops, balled into a fist. “You don’t get to say that. Not after - no. You don’t get to leave me for surviving and then love me for dying.” 

“That’s _not_ what I--” Breaks. Begins. Breaks again, waves crashing against cliff sides. “That’s not why I - why I left you.” 

Even then, she flinches at her own wording. Like she can’t bear to sum up all parts of the equation, but has no choice due to how it’s written. Depression, anger, denial, bargaining - Blake’s been through them all, veering off at acceptance. Five years and a death sentence, and still, she’ll argue semantics. 

“Are we gonna do this again?” Yang asks, soul already spread too thin, voice similarly stretched. “Really?” 

But Blake surprises her, thrusts her chin up, momentary glint in her eye. “We don’t have a lot of time left to do it, do we?” she says rhetorically, and takes the step forward Yang had taken back. “You don’t get to simplify what I - what we went through. I _didn’t_ leave you for living, Yang. I left you because he lived, too.” She pauses, and her coat looks too big on her underneath the trees, the sky, the open space surrounding the lake. “I thought I was protecting you.” 

“I didn’t _need_ protecting,” Yang replies. The sun is dulling, night creeping in. It’s the perfect backdrop for a battle neither of them are going to win. “I needed _you._ ” 

“I wasn’t going to put you in danger like that!” Blake says, desperate to be understood, the easy, simple way Yang always used to. “He hurt you to _punish_ me. What was I supposed to do, Yang - stay until he cut off the rest of your limbs?” 

It _actually_ stings, and maybe that’s why Yang snaps - she’s been guarding herself for years, packed up walls of ice and steel and distance, only for Blake to force herself through every crack. “Guess I should thank you, then, huh?” she snarls, dormant betrayal reawakening. “Now I can be killed _by_ you instead!” 

She regrets it the second it leaves her mouth, but that’s the blueprint of regret - instantaneous and calamitous - she may as well be a hurricane, leveling land and digging graves. She holds up a hand between them, covering her face with her other. 

“Never mind,” she mumbles through her fingers, trying to get a grasp on her malnourished rage. Maybe if she’d fed it earlier, it wouldn’t be so hungry now. “Just - I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did,” Blake answers roughly, and the tears don’t stain her voice as much as they do her cheeks. She’s wild when Yang looks at her again, and clearly there’s a lot they’ve both kept behind bars, waiting for a moment to be set free. “But you’re fucking crazy if you think - after all of this, after _everything_ \- I’m going to kill you.” 

Ah, an _impasse,_ Yang thinks passively as they stare each other down; whatever string used to bind them together feels like it’s now cutting off her circulation. “You don’t have a choice.” 

“You can’t make me,” Blake says, and that setting sun between them is starting to crackle, spark; but the fog’s creeping in, too, tendrils like fingers wrapping around the light. 

Forces at odds with themselves and each other. She and Blake make a perfect mirror. Similar defensive stances, postures rigid, and somehow still standing so close - the only thing she doesn’t know is which of them is the sun, and which of them is trying to put it out.

“Fine.” That’s it, then. As if there’s anything left - as if the argument is worth it. She unclenches her fists, sinks into her spine. “Have it your way.” 

Blake’s mouth curls, a disgusted half-smile at a sick joke; nothing in her life has gone the way she’s wanted it to. But she recognizes the dismissal for what it is: resignation. 

In the end, the only battle left to fight is the one they’ve already lost; raise the white flag, call back the soldiers from the beach. Or, Yang’s saying, carry on your illusion a little longer; let your war be make-believe. I’ll give this to you. A fake chance at victory.

Either way, it’s no use talking about any longer, and so they don’t.

It’s not necessarily _giving up_ , but _putting to rest:_ Blake matches her posture, focuses her gaze on the treeline fading into the sky. “We used to be normal kids,” she says quietly. “I can’t remember that anymore. Until we were - what, four? We were just normal kids.”

“Sometimes I feel like I remember everything that’s ever happened to me,” Yang says, staring closer, low on the lake. Much older than twenty-seven, where the world has grown weary of her. “And sometimes I feel like none of it happened to me at all.” 

“Yeah,” Blake whispers. The distance between them is wider than it’s ever been - if love can’t cross death, then nothing can. “I know what you mean.” 

\--

(She's always known Adam, it feels like. Her whole life. She doesn't mean that as some beautiful, metaphorical commentary - she means literally. Friend of the family, babysitter, mentor, confidant - six years older than her, Adam's been everything at one point or another, really. 

Confidant is where it ends; she’s fifteen and he’s twenty-one, and that should’ve been the first flag.

"But it's so noble," he says when she voices her hesitancy over the ritual for the first time. "You're protecting the world, Blake. Keeping us just the way we are, on the path we’re on.”

It’s a strange turn of phrase; she furrows her eyebrows automatically, thinking of the wars, the poverty, the abuse. ‘ _Just the way we are_ ’ doesn’t sound that great, all things considered, and she shudders to imagine worse. 

“Would you do it?” she asks, and she’s read the same sentence in her history textbook six times without comprehending a word. “If it were you?”

“Are you kidding? I'd die in a heartbeat. Think of the example you’ll set for Faunus everywhere. A Faunus girl, saving the world - _if_ it’s you," he adds as an afterthought. He then pauses, shifting to his bitter conclusion. "Not that all of them deserve protecting."

There’s too much packed into his paragraphs to begin deciphering it all, and she instead focuses on what she can understand immediately. “So you think the sacrifice of one person to save the world is worth it?” She frames the question idly, more resigned than argumentative, tapping the end of her pen against her notebook - there’s a clear answer, even in her eyes. But what Adam replies with cuts into her blood, builds a chill into sudden-onset hypothermia. 

An odd silence stretches before he speaks, careful and deliberate. “I think that people--” she swears she catches a glimpse of something soulless hiding in his eyes “--should get what they deserve.” 

She doesn’t push the topic further. Whatever he means by that, she’s certain she doesn’t want to know.)

\--

“I’m guessing it didn’t go too well.” 

If she had any anger left to scrounge up, it might’ve come out here - in the split second before self-control, before the fire dies to an ember, before she takes a single glance at Ruby’s eyes and finds them flooded with concern. She’s roomless and empty, consuming herself and running out of parts to build more. 

Ruby’s waiting on her bed, which is the first and last place Yang wants to be curled up alone: on one hand, her wall’s still purple, and half of Blake’s things are still scattered like they’re playing hide-and-seek with her; on the other, God, what she wouldn’t give to be sixteen again. 

She does a visual sweep. She hadn’t really had the chance to when she’d dropped her things off hours ago; even stepping foot through the doorway had been like an ocean, a nightmare, somehow the two of them combined, dragging her under. Pictures all over her mirror, the back of her door; Blake’s drawings pinned to her corkboard, quotes about love on little slips of paper stuck between. A purple scrunchy still wrapped around the back of her doorknob. The string lights Blake had insisted they hang. 

“No,” Yang finally says, trying to ignore the amount of love her teenage self let pour for Blake. That’s the problem with giving, and giving, and giving - eventually, nothing is enough. Not even an arm. “Of course it didn’t.” 

“I just thought,” Ruby starts, stops, fingers digging into her bedspread. “I thought - _now,_ maybe.” 

“I know what you thought,” Yang replies, and gives it up, lets the past pull her in. She sits gingerly beside Ruby, where she no longer has to look at her directly. Sometimes it’s easier that way. “It doesn’t change anything.” 

“Stop lying, Yang,” Ruby says tiredly, darker than the night outside. “It changes everything. You just don’t want to admit it.” 

And why _should_ she, is the response clinging onto her tongue; why is giving up her life the only path to reconciliation, why is sacrifice the neat tie of a bow - she would’ve fought the universe for Blake, to keep her safe. What she doesn’t understand is why Blake didn’t do the same for her.

“I don’t know why you think it’ll _help._ ” That’s all Yang can muster up. “It’s been years. She - I _needed_ her, Ruby. After what he did. And instead I had to do it all alone.” She leans forward, elbows on her thighs. “Forgiveness - to me, at least - means the wound healed, or is in the process of healing. And I - I’m - I’m _not._ No matter how much she apologizes, I still remember how much it _hurt._ I feel it. I mean I can really _feel_ it.”

Ruby isn’t like her; Ruby strives to see the best in people, to view their mistakes as stepping stones. She views love as something that digs roots and grows and can be watered back to health if it’s damaged. People don’t just stop _loving_ other people, she’d said once. They love ferociously until something else interferes. And people deal with interferences in many different ways. 

“Because I know you still love her,” Ruby murmurs, but even she seems on the verge of breaking herself in. “Yang - you’re my sister. I won’t kill you. And I won’t let you think you’re going to die alone.” 

“Well, unless you’re all planning on joining me,” Yang snarks back automatically, and immediately snaps her mouth shut - she’s still on the defensive, waiting for strike after strike. Waiting for her own walls to crumble under the weight of all the people she’s ever loved trying to knock them down. “I’m sorry,” she says, and falls the other way, back against her bed, arm coming to rest over her eyes. “I didn’t mean that.” 

There’s no answer from Ruby at first - she only stands up, tilts her chin up, seems to be breathing deeply, like she’s reminding herself how. The world she’s living in isn’t the one any of them were promised. 

She says, calm and stoic, “Yes, you did.” She refuses to look back at Yang, only moving towards the door. “You know, Yang - you’ve really underestimated the impact you had on all of us.” 

And before Yang can ask exactly what she means, she’s gone.

\--

(For awhile, they toy with secrecy; a cat-and-mouse game of them and their hands versus the rest of the circles’ keen awareness of their pact and its necessities. They interact subtly at school, between classes and during skipped periods, quiet in the back of the library, relaxing behind the bungalows. They’re pretty sure no one ever sees them, but they forget to be as careful otherwise. 

They go to the bar; they go to dinner, and lunch, and breakfast. They spend time in the park, in the forest, on the side streets. They’re a normal couple, except for the fact that one of them may die and they’re technically forbidden to even speak to each other, let alone do everything they’ve already done. 

Blake sort of _forgets,_ to be honest; it’s not like their parents have the energy to monitor every move they make, and there’s no official place they could be reported to for breaking the rules - these are things that make them bold and dismissive, running wild in a town that handcuffs them to its crust.

But the bell rings on a Thursday, and the illusion ends.

“So,” says a voice she’s never heard address her directly, “you and Yang, huh? What about the _treaty?_ ”

And lounging above her, resting in a tree, is Sun Wukong. Back against the bark, legs stretched out a limb, tail mindlessly flicking beneath him. 

She could turn around and walk away, leave him without an answer, so much as a word. Or she could break another few rules. 

“How did you know about us?” she asks coolly instead, opting for the latter. It’s not like he can get them in _trouble,_ and so she doesn’t care about handing him the confirmation. He doesn’t seem like someone smart enough to just have guessed, anyway. 

She’s right about that. “I saw you at the park,” he says, and she doesn’t bother keeping her eye-roll internal. “I take that shortcut home. I wasn’t, like, _stalking_ you or something.”

“Well, I don’t care about the treaty,” she says flatly. “And either way, I don’t think it’s any of _your_ business.” 

“Aw, c’mon!” Sun groans, and swings his legs over the edge, dropping to the ground. “Don’t be like that. I’m just - I dunno. I always thought it was stupid, too.” He shrugs his shoulders, and she recognizes his tone, the weight of it - it’s like none of them actually know how to address it outright. “Maybe I want to be friends, too.” 

She eyes him dubiously. “Why?” 

“I mean, this whole thing _blows,_ ” he says, so casual and conversational that she almost laughs. “And like - nobody else really gets it, you know? I have some good jokes about it that you’d all find super funny.”

This, Blake’ll realize later, is where the true unraveling begins, where the threads tug and tangle; not with her and Yang, but with her and Sun. Because one person - one person who she was inexplicably drawn to, and couldn’t stay away from; one person to share her burdens and her pain without trying to quell them - she can justify. 

With one person, it’s entirely plausible they’ll both get out of this alive. But she can’t make excuses for two. 

That’s the real danger, a loose stone rolling into a landslide; what option is she left with if she likes them all?)

\--

Blake doesn’t go home after Yang leaves her at the lake. She dreads the celebration from her parents - not only are they thrilled she won’t be the one to die, but it’s a burden off her father’s back, twenty-three long years later. He’s never talked to her about it, but she’s heard the shift from folklore to rumor; the chosen before them were their parents: her father, Yang’s mother, Ruby’s mother - and their ritual went wrong. Nobody knows how or why, as Summer Rose still ended up dead, but the punishment became tangible in the form of their children being next. 

It shouldn’t have been you, is the closest thing her father’s ever said. It was never supposed to be _you._

A little bit of evil seeping back into the world, maybe; a crack in the wall. A hint of what would be to come if their families were to disobey again.

So she doesn’t go home. She goes to Sun: the one person who won’t be afraid to give it to her straight, but also won’t try to hurt her, either. The situation they’re in is too brutal to be sugarcoated, and she doesn’t deserve that peace anyway. She doesn’t deserve to forget. Punishment, maybe, but nobody can give that better than she’s been giving to herself.

Neptune lives in the center of the downtown area, in a historic block of apartments that apparently used to serve soldiers during the War of the Broken Moon hundreds of years ago. The architecture is old, but well-kept; the buildings have been renovated to become a series of ten townhomes, expensive for the area but with great security.

She enters the passcode, steps through the gate and into the small courtyard, and automatically follows the path to the last door on the left. Number 6. Same welcome mat that’s been there since he’d left, and the same rustic watering can beside it, empty of its old flowers. That’s the problem with coming home. Everything looks the same, and yet nothing is.

Sun’s the one who answers the door - by design, most likely, as Neptune’s already dealt with her once today and probably doesn’t have the desire to do it again. She shoves her hands back in the pockets of her jacket, attempts to appear aloof; the uncertainty of her weight shifting between feet easily ruins that illusion. Not that Sun would’ve believed it anyway.

They take each other in; she’s seen him more recently than the rest of them, but it’s like looking at a shadow - a blurry figure in the rear-view mirror, someone she recognizes from another life. That hair, yes; those blue eyes, of course--

No smile. No easygoing air about him. Tail more static than it’s ever been. She didn’t expect more, but the fact that she’s getting less hurts regardless. 

“Hey,” she says. 

For a moment, he only observes her - brief glance over from head-to-toe, and then a sigh, and he pulls her into a crushing, undeserved hug. Sympathy is everywhere. 

“Blake,” he says.

“Don’t,” she breathes into his shoulder. “Don’t. I - she’s the one who...so it’s not fair. It’s not fair of you to--”

“I don’t care,” Sun interrupts, hugging her tighter. “I know what happened between you two. And guess what, Blake? _None_ of it’s fair.” She catches a small glance of the back of Neptune’s head inside, facing away from them on the couch, before her vision catches in the rain. “Yeah, Yang got the shitty, fucked-up end of the stick, but - it’s not a contest. It’s fucked up for all of us.” He pauses, letting her go. “And you love her.” 

“I _left_ her.” 

“Yeah, well.” He turns away, face hidden as he leads her inside. “Sometimes leaving is love, too.” 

\--

(When Blake tells her Sun knows, it doesn’t even occur to Yang to panic. 

In a rebellious, twisted sort of way, she thinks of it as a _victory._ One more of them to break the rules. One more of them to change. She’s been thinking about it a lot, you know, and dying for a stupid pact their ancestors made a million years ago - why _should_ she? Why should any of them? 

‘Protecting the release of a great evil’ - yeah, right. It’s far-fetched. Evil already exists. Magic can’t control her, can’t control Blake - they’re doing everything they’re not supposed to do and nothing in the universe has hinted to her that they should stop. So, fuck it; she’ll create a list, cross another name off. Hope has to start somewhere. 

“Cool,” she says in response, shrugging her shoulders. “Does he wanna hang out, too?” 

Blake laughs, in that breathy, taken-aback way; her hair falls over her face, and she pushes it back behind her ear with a hand. “Probably,” she says, grinning. “He said he has some really good jokes for us about all this.” 

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Yang says, leaning back on her hands, fingers spreading against her bedspread. “We could use someone besides me with a sense of humor around here.” 

“Sense of humor?” Blake repeats mildly. “That’s what you’re calling it, huh?” 

“Watch it, Belladonna.” 

“Did puns become funny when I wasn’t looking?” 

“They take _wit,_ Blake.” Yang actually looks pained as she says it. “Quick _wit._ ” 

“They do, do they?” Blake humors her, now looking at her History homework, completely unconcerned with the fake blow she’s giving Yang’s ego. 

“They do.” 

“That’s right, is it?” 

“That’s right!” 

“You guys are disgusting.” 

They both jump at the interruption, unused to third parties involved in their conversations. It’s probably unhealthy, Yang thinks as they both stare at Ruby, disheveled and unnerved. They spend so much time alone together they’re probably picking up on each other’s habits, carving out a new language. 

“Shut up,” Yang grumbles, steadying herself; Blake’s hands fall to her lap, fiddling with the corner of her notebook. Blake’s never really _talked_ to Ruby, despite being Yang’s sister, and Yang’s never tried to facilitate it. “What do you want?”

Ruby’s leaning against the doorway, arms crossed and mouth curled at a corner, eyes darting between them. Long past her surprise at the momentous rule-breaking, she only looks at them with amusement and a little bit of pride to have caught them so off-guard. 

She says smugly, “Dinner’s ready.” 

Oh, there’s another hit to the skull; Tai always feeds them, sure, but he rarely manages sit-down meals - all that trauma doesn’t tend to hold an appetite. Yang blinks and says, “What are you talking about?” 

“I cooked,” Ruby says, and her smile grows. “I don’t care about the stupid curse, either. And I want to get to know my sister’s girlfriend.” 

The same mark still stains their wrists; their future still calls out to them from a distance, like a storm thundering around the peak of a faraway mountain. But there are fields and roads and flowers sprawling between here and then, with such a ways to walk; _yes_ , she imagines saying, _yes, it’d be a shame to spend it all alone._

Blake glances between them, uncertain, but she’s powerless against the optimism; after all, she can’t very well rebel against the same lie she’s telling herself and refuse. She smiles back, carefully, hesitant and accepting. It’s her turn to extend a hand. “What are we having?”

Maybe, Yang thinks, maybe they’ll all get out of this better than alive. Maybe they’ll all be happy.)


	2. Chapter 2

At exactly seven forty-two p.m. on the evening of November 17th, Weiss Schnee steps off an airship and into a void. 

That’s what this town has always felt like to her: a gaping mouth on a map, teeth instead of roots, consuming anything stupid enough to settle where it breathes. Shadows always threatening, trees always looming; she’d been a child afraid of wind, but she’d been smart to be. Death waiting like a dog. Death watching from the wire. Death knocking on the door, only to run and hide like a child playing a prank when she’d answered.

“Hey,” Pyrrha murmurs softly, stepping up to her side and interlacing their fingers. “Are you okay?” 

Weiss spares a glance to their hands, their wrists pressed together. Her mark has frozen, lines stuck in a bud that will never bloom. She wonders what Yang’s looks like; how much skin it covers, if it searches for sun. If it feels anything at all, or if it just waves ominously at her, using her veins as stalks. 

“Yes,” Weiss answers, voice steady; she’d never let her first words home tremble. She’d never let whatever lingered there think she’d gone soft, and scared, and complacent. “I’m fine.” 

And even though Pyrrha knows the truth, she’d never be so cruel as to needlessly uncover it. “What are you going to do?” she asks instead, adjusting their luggage in her other hand. “Are you going to see her?” 

Seven forty-four. They’re probably the last two to land. “No,” she says, meeting the eyes of an old man who can’t stop staring at her from the taxi lane, sympathetic curve to his mouth. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to be pitied by people who still believed the stories. “I just want to go home.” 

“Okay,” Pyrrha says, and gives her hand a gentle tug as she steps forward. “We’ll go home. I’m sure Yang’s...seen too many people today, anyway.” 

Or seen the one person who mattered most, at least, but neither of them feel like it needs a clarification. Blake and Yang, together again, eleven years after opening the cell they’d all been trapped in - only to ultimately find themselves stuck slamming their fists against a room of only walls. They’d laughed at the warnings, ignored every rule, and it’d had a ripple effect - a strong wave - a tsunami against glass, until they’d all been caught up and begun to nurse the mindset of _survivors._ Of rebels. They didn’t have to bear their burdens alone, and so they wouldn’t, and maybe they’d never have to pick them back up.

Naive, Weiss thinks, following Pyrrha to the curb. Children clinging onto an irresistible hope. To a love they’d never had and never thought they’d be allowed. 

“Do you think it’ll change anything?” she asks idly. “Blake and Yang, together again?” 

“I don’t know.” Pyrrha’s always been one to shift her perspective until she can see a hint of sun; straightforward without being ridiculously optimistic. It’s not a lie, but another version of the truth. “I think that...Blake and Yang have too much history for it _not_ to, I suppose.” She pauses, mulls over her words. “I don’t know what we can change. And I don’t know what change would even mean, or what it would look like. But...I know there’s no way Blake hurts Yang. Not now. Not again.”

Love - love got them all into this, and perhaps it can get them out; or she’s reverting to her daydreams and desires, just as she did when she was seventeen. She’s always thinking about love. Her father’s lack of it; her mother’s loss of it. Her sister, hiding it underneath her sharp edges and gunfire; her brother, believing he had to be deemed worthy of receiving it. 

But Yang had been different. Blake had been different. Pyrrha, Ruby, Sun, Neptune, Jaune - if only the love she grew for all of them didn’t outweigh the pain of losing them. If only the risks proved futile in a meaningless world. If only their mistakes had been mistakes, rather than lifeboats.

Even now, as she plays with Pyrrha’s engagement ring, she can’t imagine a thing she would’ve done differently.

\--

(She’s in the teachers’ supply closet, dutifully collecting a new box of chalk and thinking only of what type of wine she’ll return home to her mother drinking when it happens. 

The door opens behind her, and another student enters. It isn’t unusual in itself, but the fact that she’s greeted directly by the newcomer _is._ “Hello, Weiss.” 

Pyrrha steps up to the shelf beside hers, digging into a box that houses markers, and nothing about her posture or expression betrays the breadth of what she’s just done. Weiss actually stares for at least ten seconds before she unsticks her voice from the roof of her mouth, where her tongue had been cradling it in confusion; Pyrrha doesn’t acknowledge the weight of it, continuing to rummage through the box as though she’d scripted the delay of shock.

“Um,” Weiss says. Pyrrha _Nikos._ Of all the people she expected to break rules, she wasn’t on the list. “Hello, Pyrrha.” 

“I know this is...strange,” Pyrrha starts conversationally, and keeps her face neutrally aligned. “But I actually...I saw something, recently, and I wondered if you knew anything about it.” 

Ah, yes; it must be about their curse. That’s the only explanation. Weiss straightens up, allows in her air of importance. She’s not sure how she could know more than Pyrrha knows, though; are they all told different pieces of information? Are there variations on the myth? She’d never thought that far. “What was it?” 

But Pyrrha takes the moment and turns it on its head, gravity shifting towards the ceiling. “I saw Yang, Sun, and Blake together last night on my way home from the store,” she says, and pauses to let Weiss absorb the information. “They were...I mean, they were talking. And laughing. Like they’re - like they’re all _friends._ ” 

Well, she’d hit the mark on _curse;_ this falls within the realm, though an entirely different end of it than the one she’d expected. “What?” she asks, and forgets decorum enough to be openly astonished. “Yang, Blake, and _Sun?_ ” 

“Yes.” They’ve both stopped their searching, and Pyrrha’s ceased her pretense of it - she probably hadn’t had a need to come to the storage closet to begin with, other than a chance to speak to Weiss privately. “I - didn’t know what to make of it. But you were the first person I thought to ask.” 

Out of everything to process, this is the one Weiss decides she wants an answer on. Maybe because it’s the easiest, and doesn’t involve an unraveling of logic that lead three of their own to ignore one of their biggest warnings. “Why?” 

“I - I’m not sure,” Pyrrha says, unnerved, and tilts her head towards Weiss before catching herself, ponytail swinging. It’s like they’re afraid to look at each other, but they manage anyway, small glances out of the corners of their eyes. “I’ve always...found you reassuring. You’re composed, and you’re articulate whenever you speak in class. I thought - I thought if there was something going on, you’d either know about it already, or - perhaps you’d want to know.” 

As long as Weiss has been alive, she’s never told a single person the whole, complicated truth about herself; her family, her friends - even the occasional stranger who simply asks _how are you_ \- never get more than a clever misdirection and a vague non-response. She’s never been honest about her father’s abuse and her mother’s addiction; about her curse and the aching loneliness of having it; about the way love causes her anxiety, because what if she isn’t good at it, and what if she can’t offer it enough, and what if she doesn’t get the chance to find out, anyway--

But she turns, faces Pyrrha, and admires her in the brief period of time it takes her to react. How simply she seems to carry her own weight, as if she’s content with her duty. How she betrays her own projection with signs Weiss utilizes very well herself: an aptitude for daydreaming, searching for another world beyond the window. And now - how her eyelashes flutter and her breath stumbles underneath the sudden attention of a person she’d never thought she’d get it from. 

Something about her makes Weiss want to be honest, for the first time in her life.

So she says, “I’ve always noticed you, too, you know,” and this is the beginning of what people call vulnerability; it makes her want to look away, run away, drink the wine her mother’s drowning in. Her fingers are digging into the metal rim of the shelf. “You seem so sure of yourself. Like you know who you are and what you stand for. I’ve always respected that about you.” 

When Pyrrha smiles in response, it’s so stunning in its authenticity that Weiss thinks she should be taking lessons.

“That’s kind of you to say,” Pyrrha says, and glances shyly away. “I’d like to think I do. But sometimes - with...what we are - it’s hard to be certain.” 

Again, again, again - Weiss is so _tired_ of their limits, of their existence, of their lives dictated and doctored. Her father calling her _special._ Her mother crying herself to sleep. Blake, Yang, and Sun, laughing together on a night out, breaking their world wide open. 

“I think we should investigate,” Weiss proposes, shrewdly leaning into several angles at once. “You and I.” 

The box of markers Pyrrha’d been loosely holding clatters back into the box. “Do you...think that’s wise?” she asks uncertainly. “Spending time together?”

No, but Weiss is done giving power to things that don’t deserve it. She stands tall, chin in the air, channeling a haughtiness and authority she’d never quite thought suited her until now. 

“Well,” she says, “clearly Yang, Blake, and Sun think so.”)

\--

Four days left. She’s the first to Yang’s door that morning. 

The house looks as it’s always looked; handmade, old but well-kept, gardens surrounding every side, stretching into endless fields and tall grass and trees. An echo of a beautiful place where people once came together and loved each other.

Ruby’s the one who answers, circles under her eyes but light still burning in them. She isn’t surprised to see Weiss standing on the doorstep, and she doesn’t waste time with small talk and pleasantries; they’d seen each other regularly over the years. And she isn’t the one dying. 

“How is she?” Weiss asks bluntly.

“Fine,” Ruby says, opening the door wider. “Like she’s accepted it.” 

Fingers clenching into fists, a boiling rage fighting the lid of her ribcage - not like this. Weiss won’t let it overtake her to make a point. She’ll be calculating and collected and pick her words like injections - ideas that might dig deep enough underneath her skin to awaken her system. Activate her instincts. Make her remember why she broke all the rules to begin with. 

“Upstairs,” Ruby says, and steps to the side. Enough of her intention must be written across her face. Weiss brushes by her into the house, takes the familiar pathway to Yang’s childhood bedroom. She doesn’t wonder where Tai is. Out in the fields, somewhere, probably, the same way Weiss’s mother is burying herself in alcohol. 

She doesn’t bother knocking. She knows Yang’s alone, moping around and feeling sorry for herself, and Weiss won’t humor that - or even give her space to put it away. 

Yang’s standing by her dresser as if she’d been looking for something, though none of the drawers are open; she turns as Weiss enters, raising a single eyebrow. She’s in an orange tank-top, and her prosthetic arm is as arresting as it’s always been in that bright yellow - no taste for color coordination, in Weiss’s opinion, that’s never changed - and the mark on her left arm isn’t what Weiss had imagined. 

The flower has bloomed, encompassing most of the inside of her wrist, petals full and stem growing into roots. Is it an act of defiance, leaving it so uncovered? Is it bravery? If only, if only - no, looking at her, Weiss understands exactly what it is.

“What is this,” Yang says, “my funeral tour? Am I doing one-on-ones now? Do I have to absolve you all individually before you kill me?” 

Resignation.

“Oh, shut up, Yang,” Weiss snaps, shutting the door behind her. “As if any of us are going to kill you.” 

“What a way to greet your best friend.” Yang opens her arms, gestures Weiss into them with a lazy wave of her hand. Weiss wants to tear her mark off, even if her skin comes with it. “Where’s my kiss? I don’t see Pyrrha with you.”

“On second thought,” Weiss says, lip curling distastefully, “maybe I _will_ kill you.” 

It’s the first thing to get a laugh out of Yang in days, but it isn’t mollifying, and doesn’t ease the tension like Yang continues pretending it does. “In that case, you are absolved.” 

“You,” Weiss says, eyes like storms, and her nails into her palms leave her knuckles bloodless. “You make me _sick_.” 

The intensity is enough for a moment of silence. Maybe Yang had expected pity, had expected grovelling; maybe she’d tricked herself into believing they’d all come to her and cry, drench her apologies. 

“What am I supposed to do, Weiss?” Yang says, and she finally allows her exhaustion room to breathe; her shoulders sink, her spine curves, and her eyes drop down before climbing back up. “I’m open to any and all suggestions. So if you’ve got one--”

“No, you aren’t,” Weiss interrupts, and makes no move to get closer. Her anger is palpable enough. There’s a picture on Yang’s dresser, out of its frame and face-up; she can’t hide every weakness. “You’ve made up your mind.” 

“I don’t think this is a case of ‘ _making up my mind’_ ,” Yang air-quotes the phrase with an eye-roll. As if Weiss is simply being over-dramatic, somehow, and not in a life-or-death situation. “It’s me. We always knew this day would come. Be grateful it’s not you.” 

She expects that to end the conversation. She’s built up an army of blows, subtle enough to not realize they’re manipulative, poking at wounds that can only scream silently in response. She expects that dying absolves _her_ of any blame, and she should be left to get on with it, rather than reminded of what got her here in the first place.

“No, Yang,” she says, and she lets her voice soften, heavy underneath the buzzing of the room. Blood in her ears, a loud static. “There was a time when we thought we could avoid this day, remember? When you were younger, and bolder, and louder. When you convinced us all we were more than this. When you were so sure of yourself, you made somebody a promise.” 

It’s about the lowest blow she can manage without being a selfish and complete bitch under the circumstances, but it’s worth it. Drastic times - she’s always making trade-offs with herself. She can’t afford sympathy. 

And it works. “That was cold,” Yang murmurs, blinking strangely, and her left arm seems to tremor slightly; another second and her prosthetic fingers wrap around the wrist, steadying it. “Even for you.” 

It doesn’t change anything. “I know.” 

“How do you even know about that?” Yang asks, and her eyes drop to the photograph, clearly what she’d been staring at before Weiss entered. “She told you?” 

“Does it matter?” 

“I guess not.” Yang bites her bottom lip, cracks finally starting to show. She’s covered in them from arm to heart, the sharp edge of a love letter straight into the bone. “I - it was different, then, okay? I was young. You said it yourself. We were - we were _all_ young.”

Oh, it’s begun; the fog seeping in the room, the lake spilling from the rug, the photographs lighting themselves on fire. Disaster zones and no evacuations. “I don’t want excuses from you.” 

“I know you, Weiss,” Yang says.

“I know you do.” 

“I think _you’re_ the one who hasn’t made up your mind,” she continues, pushing against the pegs, against rocks and hard places. “Do you hate me for dying, or do you feel too guilty to blame me for it?”

She lets it ring, thinking she’s won again. Thinking Weiss will concede the shallow defeat masquerading as a victory, and let her spend her final days with a false sense of righteousness, pretending she’s at peace. 

Before Weiss met Pyrrha, she’d never told a single soul the whole truth: not about her father’s abuse or her mother’s addiction; about her curse and its aching loneliness; about how she’d been so afraid of love she’d almost passed it by entirely. 

But meeting Yang had made her realize honesty shouldn’t be kept a secret at all, like a lockbox in a vault; keeping the world out, keeping herself in. Meeting Yang had made her realize that telling the truth was like intertwining someone else’s fingers with your own - a _togetherness,_ an open door, a warm room. Someone seeing you for who you are and liking you because of it. 

“I don’t hate you for dying, Yang.” Weiss won’t let her go in blissful ignorance, won’t let her raise the white flag. She’s spent years spitting in the face of fate only to embrace it when it matters most she doesn’t. “I hate you for giving into your death, when you were the one who made us all believe we could make it out alive to begin with.” 

\--

(She and Pyrrha decide, simply, to _watch._

They keep a closer eye on the others with their curse - all of them. Jaune and Neptune seem to keep to themselves, and Ruby, they agree, is a wild card - but likely involved, as she’s Yang’s sister. They follow their movements throughout the school day, and what they find doesn’t bring them any closer to answers. 

They can’t put their finger on it. Sun sometimes slips notes into the girls’ lockers; they’ll read them between classes and laugh. Occasionally, Yang and Blake end up in the bathroom at the same time, holding hallpasses from separate classes. Once, Pyrrha spots all three of them hanging out behind one of the bungalows; she can’t hear what’s being said, but it looks like Sun wraps his tail around Yang’s waist in an attempt to knock her over, which she then fake-wrestles with while Blake rolls her eyes. 

It’s normal, Pyrrha tells her later. It’s so strange. They’re just...so _normal._

She and Pyrrha start taking walks together after school, pondering the paradigm shift, wondering if the world they thought they lived in wasn’t exactly what they’d been told. We’re in a simulation, Pyrrha says, making a rare joke. We’re in a reality show, Weiss offers, and actually giggles. 

“That’s it,” Pyrrha says, grinning as she peels an orange; the sun blinks down on them through the branches of the trees. It’s a nice day. Weiss can’t remember ever thinking that about their town. “Do you think we’re winning or losing?” 

“Well, we’re likely in the middle of the pack, regardless of what way you’re looking at it,” Weiss reasons, and takes the slice Pyrrha offers her. “Either we’re slightly too slow at figuring out the truth they already know, which puts us behind them, but _above_ Jaune and Neptune.” 

“True,” Pyrrha hums. “And if we _weren’t_ supposed to talk to each other, we’re behind Jaune and Neptune, but _above_ them.” 

“Exactly.” 

They brush shoulders and laugh and laugh and laugh. It hurts, but in a good way.

A month after it’s all started, Weiss realizes they should probably _stop_ spending time together; they were never supposed to develop a friendship, never supposed to talk past a mystery, never supposed to _want._ Her chest sinks, a balloon releasing air; not like the pressure’s been released, but like it’s been forced. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, self-preservation torn in two conflicting directions: she can’t like Pyrrha, not if she may one day kill her. But living without her until then is a hell wrapped up in the concept of loneliness. 

She has trouble sleeping; she dreams of Yang and Blake, whispering over her grave as Sun smiles. Ruby’s there, leaning against a tree; she looks on knowingly, saying nothing. And Pyrrha - Pyrrha’s right beside her, frozen as if a sculpture, a hollow imitation of herself. She’s losing her appetite, teeth worrying her bottom lip and leaving marks. Pyrrha understands why, but can’t bring herself to pull away. 

Weiss decides she’s had enough. 

On a Friday evening in May, she asks her family’s butler to drive her from their mansion on the hill to the opposite edge of town, where the border starts and the fields stretch into the forest. Yes, she knows all the players and pieces - Yang and Ruby live in a small house surrounded by gardens on a truly alarming number of acres of land that _their_ father refuses to sell; she’s heard her father complaining on more than one occasion about its wasted value. Klein doesn’t ask, only inclines his head and somehow sneaks away the keys. 

Don’t wait for me, she tells him, and his eyes wish her luck.

She stands on the sidewalk for a moment, staring up at the house, counting the lights on in the windows, searching for shadows that mark the presence of people. After a minute, she finds it; a sudden movement on the second floor, and what sounds like a shout of laughter. 

Her jaw clenches; her fingers squeeze into fists. Every bit of her indignant, and for what - this is what she asks herself - for _what?_ Suffering when others have decided to shed their own? What does she _want?_ Absolvement? Relief? 

She bangs hard on the door, and waits for five, four, three, two-- 

Yang’s the one who swings it open, smile dying on her lips; she’s in an orange tank-top that leaves a slip of skin above the waistband of her black shorts. Tall, defined, dangerous. Her reputation’s always chasing after her, but never quite manages to do her justice. 

The crickets cut through the silence, night settling around them. Now that she’s here, she doesn’t exactly know what to say, or even what answers she’s searching for. What does she want _,_ what does she want--

Yang settles into the idea faster than Weiss is able to think through it, palm flat against the doorframe, one ankle crossed over the other. Posture screaming triumph. Smirk winning a war.

“ _Well_ , now,” she murmurs, and Weiss balks against the sudden _strangeness_ of her - hair a shade too bright, eyes a hue too red - before she blinks and it’s gone. “I can’t say I expected _you_ to break the rules, Schnee.” 

“Clearly,” Weiss says scathingly, “we don’t know each other very well, do we?” 

Ah; she’s hit a button she wasn’t even aware could be pushed. Yang raises an eyebrow, leans forward. “We don’t,” she says, and it’s like she’s telling Weiss a secret. “Don’t you ever wonder why that is?” 

What does she _want_ \--

“Yes,” Weiss says, thinking of company and kindness, of bluer skies and wider roads, of sights and stars and sunsets. She raises her chin slightly. “That’s something I’ve begun to wonder quite often.” 

And then Blake hits the third-to-last step on the stairs - hair in a ponytail, shirt too big to be hers - and pauses, staring from over Yang’s shoulder. There’s a glimpse of Sun as he walks out of what Weiss assumes is the kitchen, holding a beer in each hand and one with his tail. And, as if the universe knows she’s been keeping score, Ruby yells something about popcorn from another room that echoes throughout the house.

Yang watches her jam the pieces together despite the absence of a bigger picture. Watches her face soften and her fingers uncurl and her spine straighten. Watches her rise under a world suddenly rendered weightless.

“We’ve made our choice, Weiss,” Yang says, and steps back into the entryway as if showing her the crossroads, the _could-haves_. “You’re free to make yours.” 

Oh, of _course_. 

It dawns on her there, standing on the doorstep of a house with light and laughter pouring out of it, a house full of people she’d been told she’d never be allowed to love. 

What she wants is to be _free._ )

\--

Weiss returns to the place she grew up in.

She doesn’t call it home - home, to her, is a warm and welcoming place where you’re wanted and cared for, tinted by a bittersweet nostalgia the longer you’ve been away. Her memories of home are Yang’s living room, piled under blankets and watching horror movies late into the evening. The hammock in Blake’s backyard, on the afternoon they spent trying to see if they could all fit into it without it breaking beneath their weight. The charming townhouse she and Pyrrha share in Argus, and all the mornings they sit across the table having breakfast and drinking coffee. 

Home is not where she grew up.

The mansion sits high on the hill, as impressive and daunting as it’s always looked: long driveway lined with carefully-pruned trees; ivy growing up the outer walls, giving it an elegance and grandeur that only comes with time; wide windows conveying the illusion of sunlight, as if it _should_ be bright and open and airy on the inside, though Weiss knows better. 

White floors, white walls, and not nearly enough people to justify the number of cold, empty rooms. Too much space, filled with nothing. Not even memories. 

But she’s never coming back to this fucking town again after Saturday. She doesn’t say _after the ritual_ because she’s not performing the fucking ritual either, consequences be damned, hell and back in a handbasket. She’s simply done. Letting go of the life she had once and for all, embracing her new one. And so she owes at least _some_ of her family a goodbye. 

It’s easy finding her way to the garden.

As a child, the journey’d felt insurmountable. Her small legs versus the long hallways and the heavy doors, the maze of hedges and flowers and fog - it hardly seems worth it now, but she’d been young, seeking comfort and reassurance and safety. Monsters in the night, eyes in the dark, the mark moving on her wrist - things Willow could never even save herself from, let alone her daughter.

And in nine years, nothing’s changed. 

Her mother is a little older, sitting in the same chair, staring at the same view, drinking the same wine. Weiss could recreate that exact label in her sleep, etched into a blanket that suffocates her. She’s wearing a long-sleeved dress with a belt around the waist, one leg crossed over the other, hair in a delicate braid. And when Weiss takes the chair opposite her, she barely even blinks.

“It’s here already, is it?” she murmurs, her expression blank and voice monotone. “Twenty-three years.” 

“Yes,” Weiss says softly. After everything, she can’t hate her mother. “Four days.” 

Without asking, Willow takes the bottle and slowly pours Weiss her own glass. She’s still barely looked at her daughter, but then again, that wasn’t something she’d ever properly been able to do anyway - all she saw was her own trauma, living proof of her mistakes and punishments. 

Weiss reckoned with this long ago. She doesn’t expect anything differently now.

Except--

“I’m sorry,” Willow says suddenly, and covers Weiss’s free hand with her own; she has no strength to her grip, and even a gentle squeeze appears to take her tremendous effort. “Weiss - I’m so, so sorry.” 

“I’m alive,” Weiss says, both in comfort and defiance. “You didn’t kill me, okay? I don’t need your apologies.” 

“But you deserve it,” Willow whispers, startlingly present. “Sometimes you hurt people, and you never get the opportunity to apologize. I’ve needed to apologize. All this time.”

 _But not to me,_ Weiss thinks, picturing a lone grave by a lake. _Not to me._

She takes another long look at her mother. Older, wearier, and traumatized - she never should’ve stayed here, twenty-three years ago. She should’ve packed up and moved out and lived a life somewhere stable, without magic and curses and the threat of destruction. Where someone loved her and let her heal, or at least taught her how. 

“Why did you stay?” Weiss asks, finally picking up the second glass, idly swirling the wine the way she’d been taught to do at ten. “After Summer - why did you stay?” 

This time, Willow meets her stare with a disturbing, unsettling clarity. “We killed her,” she says quietly, before drifting far-off and away again, where she always is. “We killed her, and could’ve killed you. I didn’t deserve to leave. I deserve to rot here.”

\--

(Ruby doesn’t remember Summer Rose’s death.

She’d been too young to comprehend it fully - ideas of loss and permanence, saviors and sacrifice: they’d meant nothing to a toddler who expected her mother to walk through the door and cradle her in her arms whenever she cried. And that was all she could do, then. Cry. 

What she understood was the absence of one thing, and the presence of another. 

Summer was gone - Ruby didn’t know why. But Yang was there, holding her hand, playing games with her, reading her to sleep. Keeping her happy and carefree without being able to answer a single one of her questions, which were all a variation of _why, what happened, where did she go,_ until she’d eventually stopped asking. Ultimately, Yang lets her be a child, and it’s only years later that she wonders if Yang was even one herself.

Here’s what Ruby remembers:

Tai is there, but he isn’t. He sits on their couch and stares at the television, like he’s waiting for the room to swallow him. He spends a lot of time in the garden, burying demons without letting them grow. He cooks them dinner. He asks them what they did that day. He kisses them on the forehead. His grief is so palpable he drowns them in it. 

But Yang does a good job, and so does their Uncle Qrow, who comes around often to check on them; he picks up some of the slack, and spends time with Tai on the back porch, drinking from his flask and talking about things Ruby can’t make sense of. He chases them around the fields behind their house, pretending to be a monster they have to conquer, and lets them whack him with their tiny fists until he falls to the ground with a smile. 

When she turns five, he beckons her to the yard, asks her if she wants to go on a walk. 

This she remembers perfectly.

A long walk through the woods, ending in a strange clearing with a big, black stone in the middle, a beautifully blooming tree with brilliantly red leaves growing beside it. It feels magical and special, and she stares at it in awe.

He bends down to her level, arms on his knees. “You know the mark on your wrist?” he says calmly to her, and shows his own. “Like mine, and Yang’s?” 

“Yeah,” Ruby says, thrusting out her own little hand, comparing them. His is a lot bigger, but it’s the same type of shape, like the small bud of a flower. “We all match! But not Daddy.” 

“That’s right,” Qrow says. “You’ve had this mark since you were about two. Yang’s had hers since she was four. And I’ve had mine for a long, long time.”

“Wow,” Ruby says, eyes big and excited. “What’s it mean?” 

His smile isn’t right anymore, like it’s slipping off his face, like the glue hasn’t dried. There’s a breeze, too, leaving her with a slight chill. She’s five and she doesn’t know much, but she knows when her world is about to change for good.

He says gently, “It means that we were chosen for something,” and pauses, holding his breath in his chest with the words he wants to keep trapped there. “Something not very nice, but very important.” 

She gazes up at him, listening harder than she’s ever listened to anything, and lets him continue. He catches her small hands between his own. “A long time ago,” he starts, like he’s telling her a bedtime story, but she gets the feeling she’s not going to like this one, “our ancestors fought in a very scary, very big battle. They were good people who wanted to save the world, but in order to do that, they had to make a...deal, with each other, and with the force of _Good._ ” It’s not so hard, here - she’s heard lots of tales of heroes and monsters, of wars and victory. “They sealed away _Evil_ in a tomb, but in order to keep it there, they’d have to sacrifice something every fifty years.”

“Woah,” Ruby says, enthralled. She doesn’t notice the strange shine in his eye, or how he clears his throat a little too often. “Sassifice...what’s that mean?” 

“It means,” he says, swallowing, “to give something up.” 

“What do they have to give up?” 

He ruffles her hair suddenly, palm flat against her forehead and covering her eyes; she can’t see his face as she laughs and squeaks, backing away. When she does, she sees his smile fixed, like this time he decided to use tape. 

“Nothing, yet,” he says, and stands, stretching. “But there’s one important rule, okay? One rule you have to follow.”

“Okay.” She waits, neck craned back to look up at him.

“There are other people with a mark like ours,” he says. “Other kids like you and Yang.”

“How many?” 

“Six.” He counts it on his fingers for her. “There are six other kids. But you can’t talk to any of them.” 

_Can’t_ without a reason is something she doesn’t often understand. “Why not?” 

This she remembers perfectly. As if it’d been recorded and caught on tape, played back over and over until it’d melted into her skull like another tattoo: the angle of the sun, the stubble on his chin, the redness of his eyes. How tall he’d looked to her, then. How unbreakable. How long his shadow stretched behind him underneath the sun.

How she was just five years old, happy to spend time with an uncle she loved.

“Because they might hurt you, one day,” he’d said, so serious she could do nothing but believe him. “Or you might hurt them. You won’t want to, and neither will they, but you won’t have a choice. And it will hurt less if you don’t know them.” 

She’d bitten her lip, little fingers becoming fists, an instinctual response to the idea of being hurt. “Did I do something wrong?” she’d asked tearfully. “Am I going to?” 

“No, Ruby,” he’d said quietly, and confessed a truth that’d take years to come to light. “You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s us who messed up.” 

And at fourteen, watching her sister fall in love with Blake Belladonna, she finally understands exactly what his warnings had meant. 

She wonders if any of them had loved Summer, and that’s why they’d tried to avoid killing her.

She wonders if loving people you’re not supposed to is part of the curse itself.)

\--

Three days to go, and Ruby’s already at a grave. 

There’s something to be learned here, she thinks, standing on the small hill overlooking the lake, where a prettily carved plaque rests in the dirt. There’s a kind of wisdom to be gained, if only she digs deep enough. If only she presses her hands into soil and learns to speak to the dead. 

_Summer Rose,_ the plaque reads. _Loved by all. Returned to Light._

It’s an ancient epitaph for those who’ve been sacrificed; a marker of a protector, a selfless hero. Someone who cared for the world and its people so much it outweighed the benefit of their own life. The greater good. 

And it’s undoubtedly, undeniably sinister. 

“I see you beat me to it.” 

Yang steps up beside her, arms crossed, pulling her jacket tighter around her body. Grey sky, bare trees; dark, immovable water. Yes, it’s the perfect day to talk to ghosts. 

“Yeah.” Ruby shifts slightly to the left, sharing the centerpoint of the memorial site. Summer was Yang’s mother, too, blood or not. “I was trying to imagine what she’d say, if she were here.”

“So you’ve beat me to it twice,” Yang says, staring morosely down at the gravestone. The wind whips her hair around her face. “That’s what I was going to do, too. Gotten anywhere?” 

“I don’t remember her like you do,” Ruby says. Not an accusation, but a precursor. “I only know what I’ve seen in Dad’s old videos, I’ve - reconstructed her, I guess, in the vague memories I do have.” 

But Yang shakes her head, lips red in the cold, the rest of her face nearly bloodless. “You knew her,” she says, with a soft note of finality. 

She needs this. Maybe they both do. “Then,” Ruby starts, “I think she’d say ‘Thank you.’” 

“‘Thank you’?” 

“For raising me,” she says, “when Dad couldn’t.” She lets the sentiment sit for a moment, but can’t give it time to sink. “She’d tell you you did your best, and that she was proud of you, and me, and we turned out better than she ever could’ve hoped for. She’d say sorry for not being here herself.”

“She’d probably apologize for not dying sooner,” Yang tacks on, expression unreadable. “Since it would’ve saved us from having to.” 

It’s been a long time since she’s cried over Summer, and yet. “Probably,” Ruby whispers, pressure of tears behind her eyes. She knows Yang isn’t being cruel, but even if she were, Ruby couldn’t blame her. “She never wanted this.” 

“No,” Yang agrees quietly. “None of them did. None of us ever do.” 

A curse, passed through bloodlines, born of a war and carried on as a blessing. A ritual for protecting the world from an unspeakable evil should be a noble thing, a _just_ thing; they should be heralded, written down in poems, sung about in songs. They should be folktales people gather around campfires to hear. 

That’s what Ruby wishes Summer could tell them: How something meant to be so _wonderful_ could feel so...malevolent. 

Sometimes, in fairytales, good people do die - she’s familiar with these stories. There’s a courageous sacrifice, and that heinous act of death alone is enough to rouse and rile the hearts of other good people, who take up the fight in their place, become victorious. Sometimes many good people die, in battles and wars and trying to do the right thing at great personal cost. 

But she’s never read a story where a good person dies at the hands of other good people, who remain traumatized and incapicitated for the rest of their lives by what they’ve been forced to do. 

The grass is longer around her headstone, more vibrant. There are patches of tiny flowers littering the hill that don’t grow anywhere else. A frog croaks nearby. For a shining, beautiful second, Ruby even swears she sees sun.

“You know what she’d really tell you, Yang?” 

“Hm?” 

“She’d tell you not to give up.” 

For two years, Summer lived after she should’ve died. Two years the rest of their parents decided against killing her. There was a reason. There must’ve been a reason. 

Yang doesn’t respond, but her eyes focus on a point closer to the shore, vision sharper. Ruby continues lowly, “If she believed that this was right, she would’ve died when she was supposed to; she would’ve _insisted_ upon her death. But she didn’t, and I don’t think she’d want to see _you_ racing towards it, either.” 

She never raises her voice, never changes her tone. She speaks like it’s a prophecy, like a greeting card, like a weather report. Yang doesn’t bristle because she can’t; because Ruby loves her, and because Summer did, too.

“Maybe,” is all she says, so soft it’s almost lost to the wind.

They’re both staring down at the plaque now, the symbolic marker of a body that was never buried. There’s no hollow earth below them, no clay urn, no wooden casket. Not even dust.

“Sometimes, before this,” Ruby whispers over what they both know is an empty grave, “I thought about joining her.”

“And now?” 

“Now,” she says, a determinism to her she definitely didn’t get from their father, “I think she’d kill me if I let you.”

Like she said: it’s a perfect day to talk to ghosts.

\--

(Yang never expects them to go unnoticed forever.

When it’d been only her and Blake? Maybe. They could’ve found loopholes, back alleys, unlocked doors; even her, Blake, and Sun could’ve gotten away with it for the next few years until skipping town entirely, where they’d be fully free to do as they pleased without the pressure of people watching them. But when Weiss comes knocking on their door, it’s making smoke signals out of haystacks. It’s breathing alcohol onto a wildfire. It’s blowing stop signs and speed limits and war horns.

Because it isn’t just about _love,_ anymore. It isn’t about vulnerability and pain and loneliness. No, no; when Weiss comes knocking, it’s also about _defiance._ And when Weiss brings Pyrrha, well-- 

Yang’s blood burns hot enough for an uprising. 

“You’re enjoying this a little too much,” Blake tells her one evening, reading a book with her back against Yang’s headboard, showing far too much skin to stay reading for long. “Everyone giving in.” 

“ _You_ started it,” Yang says, stretching her arms above her head; Blake’s gaze drops to her stomach, to her legs. “You were like, ‘you’re so hot, I think you should do me instead of killing me’--” 

She’s cut off by a pillow straight to the face, but weight isn’t enough to drown out the sound of Blake’s laughter. “I won’t be _doing you_ at all if you keep making shit up.” 

“Belladonna.” Yang gets to her knees, very seriously, and leans so close their foreheads are almost touching, lips inches apart. “Did you or did you not break our _noble family pact’s_ only rule because you saw me without a shirt on?” 

“Hm.” Blake snaps her book shut, pretending to consider. “It’s hard to say. Take your shirt off again - maybe it’ll jog my memory.” 

She doesn’t expect it to work, but Yang sits back, slips her fingers under the hem of her tank-top, and pulls it right over her head. Her smirk lounges wickedly in place when she resumes her previous position, mouth even closer, body language playfully demure. _You got what you wanted,_ she’s saying. _Now remember how to use it._

“So?” Yang murmurs, truly looking like every bad thing Blake’s ever been warned about. “Anything?” 

“You stupid bitch,” Blake says breathlessly. Her book falls to the floor, but she’s already forgotten how to read. 

“Excuse me?”

“You stupid, _hot_ bitch,” she corrects, gaze dropping to Yang’s collarbone, chest, abs. 

“Much better,” Yang says, but she’s too impatient to keep a joke when Blake’s directly in front of her, begging to be kissed. She slips Blake’s bottom lip between her own, nipping at it with her teeth, and Blake’s hands cup her face, curling against her cheeks.

On these nights, her skin smolders so hot it asks for atmosphere, hair so addicted to moonlight it absorbs it, pupils so in awe of what she’s seeing her irises invent a whole new color. On these nights, Blake melts to black and flings shadows over the room, everywhere inside of her at once: pouring like ocean, salt on her thighs, sweet on her tongue, waves lapping at soft-sand shores.

Yang opens windows, and talks about invention. 

“I love you,” she murmurs, letting cool air spill across their bodies and wondering how similar it feels to spilling blood. Her fingers rest on the fluttering pulse of Blake’s neck. “I love you. I’ll find a way out of this for you, I swear. I’d do anything for you.”

“I’d do anything for _you,_ ” Blake whispers back, brushing their noses together. “I’ll protect you. Somehow. I’ll find a way.” 

They think they’re having the same conversation, reading lines from the same page. They think they know exactly what the other wants, and what their love entails. They think they’re in it together.

And for Yang, that means doubling down upon being found out.

She’s pretty sure Tai knows, but he’d been thrust into trauma rather than born to it, and he doesn’t have the willpower to regulate his two potentially-dying daughters’ lives to the extent the curse had warned him to. One lost wife, another dead. There’s only so much a person can take, Qrow had said once, watching him pick tomatoes from his garden. 

And it’s Qrow who says something now, catching her on a morning after with Blake still upstairs in her bed and three of Tai’s omelettes plated on the counter. 

"You're making a mistake, Yang," is all he says, flask held aloft in his hand. 

Eventually, Sun finds Neptune sitting alone on a bench in the park and makes him an offer. Eventually Ruby gives into her guilt, drags Jaune off the street and into a restaurant. Eventually they all leave this fucking town and scatter across the world in pursuit of knowledge, of art, of experience, of _life_ \- and have four more perfect years before Blake and Yang break them all, snapping the lynchpin.

But Qrow can’t know all that yet, and neither can she.

"Well," Yang says, "guess it runs in the family.")

\--

The clock forces Blake talking again. Thinking. Planning rebellions and escape routes.

She still hasn’t gone home - she’s answered her parents’ texts letting them know she _is_ back in town, at the very least, and they’ve left her there, content with the knowledge she’s alive and will remain as such. She’s barely slept, barely ate, barely existed the past five years, and it’s taken her until now to fight for her own life. 

That’s what Yang is. Her life.

“What are you going to do, Blake?” Neptune asks, handing her a mug of tea. “Drink it. You look like shit.” 

“Thanks,” she says, and she can’t even be sarcastic. “I don’t know. I just--” she breaks off, blows on the hot liquid as she collects her thoughts, flying away from her like they’re racing each other. “I...I hurt her. When I left. And I know she doesn’t - she understands _why_ I did it, but don’t think she understands _how._ ” Another pause. Flashbacks of blood and bruises and bone. Screaming - in her nightmares, someone’s always screaming, sometimes everyone at once, jaws unhinged and careening wildly, skin tearing and slipping. “Yang doesn’t love like that. She’s all or nothing. She’ll fight or she’ll die, and when I left, I - I took what she had to fight for.” 

“So go give it back,” Sun says like it’s the easiest thing in the world, leaning over the back of the couch. He flicks one of her ears with his tail, and she flinches. “You broke her heart, Blake. Go fix it.” 

“You don’t think I’ve _tried_?” she asks pointedly, thinking of missed calls and messages, heated arguments and bags and boxes.

“No,” Sun says, shooting her a sharper look than she’s used to; even Neptune raises his eyebrows. “I don’t. I think you’ve tried to defend yourself a million times, and all your apologies probably end with ‘but’.” 

“I think what he’s trying to say,” Neptune chimes in delicately, “is that even _if_ you think you did the right thing, Yang never will, and you hurt her.” He lets it sit for a moment, hopes it rises instead of sinks. “You left her. Now she’s leaving you.” 

“ _You_ said leaving can be love,” Blake shoots at Sun, but he only shrugs, chin resting on his arms.

“Sure,” he says. “A lot of things are love. But love doesn’t always make you do the right things.”

“Fine. Fine!” Blake says, taking a gulp of tea before putting it down on the coffee table, purposefully ignoring the coaster. Neptune winces, but wisely decides to wait. “I’ll go talk to her - _again._ And I’ll try not to _defend myself_ despite the fact that a man I _knew_ was dangerous cut off her _arm_ because he wanted _me,_ which is why I left. Thanks, guys. Really!” She gets up, grabs her coat off the hook by the door. “And maybe if I manage to do _that_ right, she’ll decide _against_ having us all kill her in a couple days. Great plan!” She’s nearing outrage, voice rising on the edge of hysterical. “Fuck _you!_ ” 

The door slams shut. 

“I think that could’ve gone better,” Neptune says.

“All things considered,” Sun says, “I think it went perfectly.”

\--

(Yang’s picked sides, taken stances; her path forward stretches out cleanly in front of her, unmarred by things she’s not supposed to want. How she’s reconciled them all, Blake’s not quite sure, but her own path isn’t nearly as clear.

For one thing, she still isn’t sure how she actually feels about the curse. 

It’s real, that much is certain - but the consequences of what will happen if it’s ignored seem to vary, legend by legend, family to family. Their parents’ punishment came in the form of watching their children die. But what if they don’t have children? What if there’s nothing to blackmail them, manipulate them into fear and hatred?

She sounds like Ruby, she realizes; Ruby, whose theories about the curse always lean dark and corrupt.

 _If it’s so honorable_ , Ruby always says, _why doesn’t it feel that way? Why aren’t we treated like it? What are the myths hiding?_

Bits and pieces of it rub off, lie in waiting in the corners of her mind. That, maybe, even _calling_ it a curse isn’t just a bastardization of the actual pact their families had formed, but a sliver of the truth. That what they’re born into isn’t kind, and fair, and good; it’s rotten, decaying, decrepit, and they’ll never uncover the extent of it until they force it out of hiding. 

But what will that _look_ like, she keeps returning to. Magic is real, and the curse is real, the ritual is protecting something _real_ \- is it so evil that only evil can contain it? And if they release it, will they even have a world left to live in?

Circles and circles and circles. She shifts back to one day at a time, lets Yang kiss away her questions and fears and insecurities. She focuses on classes, her newfound friendships, colleges. She heads into the future.

Unfortunately, she can’t leave everything behind. 

Adam corners her outside of her house on one of the rare days she’s there, blue eyes seething and jaw clenched tight. 

“Yang Xiao Long?” he hisses, hands balled up into fists. His entire body trembles like it’s about to split. “ _That’s_ where you’ve been lately? With _her?_ ” 

She eyes him oddly, unnerved at both his anger and proximity. “Why do _you_ care?” she asks, and makes a move to go around him; he steps in front of her, blocking her path. “What’s your problem, Adam?” 

“You have a _duty,_ ” he snarls, and she almost expects the pressure to tear him apart from the inside out until he becomes something else. “You’re supposed to _protect_ the world as it is, and instead you’re fucking around with a girl you’ll probably have to _kill._ ” He stands straighter, lets his mouth curl cruelly into a smirk. “If I’m lucky.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she asks, raising a hand; she wouldn’t have expected this from him, but she won’t ignore alarms. “What I do is _none_ of your business, and you shouldn’t even _know_ about the curse.”

“But I do.” He steps closer. “You trusted me. So what happened, Blake? Who got inside your head?” He pauses, purposefully drops his eyes down her body and up. “Or your bed?” 

She’s in _danger,_ something’s telling her. And not normal danger. She’s a sixteen year-old girl in a horror of a town with a death warrant; there isn’t a lot of fear she’s unfamiliar with at this stage of her life, with the circumstances she’s in. She knows the fear of walking alone at night and seeing an unfamiliar man behind her on the street, or the jolt she gets from the eyes of an animal catching in the light and glinting out at her through the trees, or the oppressive darkness that settles over fields at night, grass moving as if something is hiding in it. 

This is new, and foreign, and beyond her ability to comprehend.

“I think that’s enough.” 

She hadn’t even heard the front door open.

Neither had Adam, judging by his scowl, obediently taking a step back. “Sir,” he says. “I didn’t see you--” 

“I know you didn’t,” Ghira interrupts, resting his large hand on Blake’s shoulder. “A little too busy attempting to intimidate my daughter, I think.” 

Adam’s scowl deepens, eyes narrowing; everything about him is at odds, from his blue eyes to his red soul, jealous and spiteful and entitled. He speaks of honor and nobility, but only in the context of cruelty. She’s finally understanding what’d he’d meant about people getting what they deserve. 

“I wasn’t--” 

“Spare me the excuses,” Ghira says coldly, holding firm. “It’s time for you to leave now.” 

Standing on another man’s property with a metaphorical gun pointed to his head isn’t a platform, and Adam’s well aware of this. He slinks back to his car without another word, screeching out of their driveway and back down the road; they watch him until he takes a left turn and disappears. 

“Thanks,” Blake says, still processing. 

“Has Adam spoken to you like that before?” Ghira asks her, removing his hand now that the display of support is unnecessary. “You can tell me if he has.”

“No.” Blake shakes her head, ears still pressed back in defense. She can’t shake the sense she’s being watched. “He’s never...done anything like that before. He just got mad because I haven’t been around.” 

“Well, it’s entirely inappropriate,” Ghira says. “I won’t be allowing him around again anytime soon.” He starts to turn, and then seems to comprehend what she’d said. “Where _have_ you been, anyway?” 

She thinks about lying to him. New friends from school, she imagines saying. Oh, I’ve been driving to the town over for a change of pace. I’ve taken up birdwatching. I’m extremely busy with a class project. 

But he’s been where she is, and he’d recognize the dishonesty. 

So she says, “You’ll be happier not knowing.” 

A day will come in the future where he’ll return early from a business trip and find his daughter with the seven people capable of hurting her most, reveling in the first taste of spring weather.

He’ll turn away from the window, and dream of Summer.)

\--

Here’s the thing about Yang: Blake can always find her, and vice versa. 

Neither of them know why, exactly, only that their keen awareness of the other resulted in something more akin to an added sense: like Blake could close her eyes and picture Yang and walk, and whenever she opened them, that’s where Yang would be. They’d made a game of it when they were younger, following the string that tied them together until meeting in the middle.

Today, late afternoon, Yang is by the river, and the trek there gives her a chance for perspective. 

“Back again, Belladonna?” 

And as much as Yang doesn’t want to admit it, the string is still there.

She’s just sitting on a stump by the bank, watching the water rush by below her with her chin resting in her palm; dark jeans, tan workboots, red-and-black plaid jacket over a white shirt - it’s not the time for desire, but that’s not exactly within Blake’s control. 

“We were together for six years,” Blake says, stepping carefully over protruding roots in the dirt to get closer to her. “One fight? I wouldn’t let you go without at least a thousand.” 

It’s a remark that makes Yang smile, despite the evidence otherwise. “But you did.” 

“Well, then, I’m a fucking moron,” Blake replies, tossing up her hands. Closer now, ducking under the branch of a tree. Yang doesn’t stop her, but doesn’t beckon her, either. “If, after _everything_ , all I’ve made you believe is that I never must’ve loved you at all in order to hurt you how I did, then I - then it doesn’t _matter_ if I thought I was right. I wasn’t.” 

A hint of disbelief sinks Yang’s eyebrows; she sits up, perturbed by the change in tone. “What?” 

Right in front of her. Blake stops, stares down, releases tension like balloons, lets her body drift somewhere away. She pretends she’s bare in front of Yang, heart and nerve exposed, nothing left to do but tell the truth - even if only her version of it. 

Whether she goes through with it or not, as of right now, Yang is dying in three days. And if she wants her to fight, she needs to remind her what it feels like to have something to fight for. 

“I’m not - I’m not lying to you or humoring you because you’re - supposed to die,” Blake says, working hard to get around the sentence. Black hair spilling over her shoulders, coat unbuttoned, boots covered in mud. At sixteen, Yang never would’ve imagined she’d become so beautiful. “Call it a paradigm shift. I did what _I_ thought was right, okay? Because I loved you more than I cared about me. I wasn’t _happy_ without you, Yang. I was miserable. But you were alive, and he wouldn’t hurt you again, and I thought - I thought that was the best I could give you.” 

“But _why_?” Yang stands, lets her height come into play; Blake resists the urge to reach out, fix the hood of her plaid jacket. They’re both glass to the other, and so easy to shatter. “Why wouldn’t you _listen_ to me? Why did you spend all that time _running?_ Six years, and I didn’t even matter enough to deserve a second chance?”

“A second chance for what?!” Blake exclaims, and she’s twenty-two again, unequipped and unprepared to face a world where she has to hurt the people she loves. Warnings are so simple to ignore when you’ve never faced the consequences. “You didn’t _need_ a second chance! You were - you deserved so much _better_ than me, Yang! Okay? That’s what I thought, then. It was _my_ fault you lost your arm, and if I couldn’t even protect you from that, how could I _possibly_ protect you from something _worse_?! Especially - especially when it was _my_ fault. When it was _all_ my fault.” 

All this talk of death and dying - the dead start to listen, unearth themselves. The skeletons put on their suits and walk out of the closets. The secrets never stay buried for long, no matter how many layers of skin they’re hidden under. 

“That’s what you were afraid of?” Yang whispers, her expression startled and open; it’s strange how young vulnerability makes her look. Even the water appears to slow, desperate for a moment to listen. “You - you were afraid of _this?_ ” 

“Of course!” Blake says, choking on the words as they leave her mouth. “I almost watched you die! And I couldn’t imagine - I couldn’t imagine living in a world without you. And I started thinking about - about how one day, what if I had to?” The grief and guilt and rage gives way to something quieter, but takes up just as much space. “You heard Adam. You were there. I started thinking he was right.” 

“Blake,” Yang says, prosthetic fingers hovering below her elbow, never touching. “How could you - how could you _believe_ that?” 

“Because it’s true,” Blake says.

“It isn’t even _close,_ ” Yang replies hotly, and for a moment, she’s fighting the same battles she used to - Blake’s demons, at war with herself. “None of this was your fault. None of it.” 

“I’m the one who spoke to you first.” Her voice comes so pointed it could cut. “I broke the rules. I’m the reason everyone did, eventually. I’m who Adam wanted. I’m why we’re here now, all taking turns trying to convince you not to sacrifice yourself for a curse we’re all trying to fucking _break._ ” She stops, breath steam in the cold air, and poses a final question. “Unless you’re telling me you honestly want to die.” 

It’s a time for thundering horses, a lightning storm, the collapse of a city. “God, damn - _no,_ okay?!” Yang responds frustratedly, extending and dropping her arms. They’re always so _close_ to getting there until they don’t. “Of course I don’t want to die. I want - I wanted to be with _you._ Out there, somewhere in the world, living normal lives. I wanted to _marry_ you, and have a house with you, and forget this stupid town even existed.” Blake wants to kiss her anger until it cools, just the way she used to. Wants to shove her against a tree and tell her to stop wasting time. “I thought maybe if we _all_ forgot, we wouldn’t end up right back here, comforting each other about the ethics of ritualistic sacrifice. So no, Blake,” she finishes breathily, holding the back of her hand up to her mouth as if everything that’d just spilled out of it broke a dam to do so. “No, I don’t want to fucking die. But I can _feel_ it. I mean I can really - I can _feel_ it, waiting for me.” 

“Good,” Blake says, and extends her hand. “That’s a good first step. Not wanting to die.” 

“It doesn’t _change_ anything.” 

“It might.”

“No,” Yang says, shaking her head with certainty. “Because the rest of you are gonna start feeling it, too.” 

\--

(Being a high-school senior is only exciting because they’re one year closer to leaving. 

None of their families expect them to stick around after they graduate highschool, which is an oddity in and of itself, as they live in one of those towns where people often do. But their families are also somewhat strange in that way, never belonging anywhere: Sun’s got family all over the world, nomadic and welcoming - he’s already seen most of it by the time he’s due to leave. Neptune’s family owns the largest libraries and museums across all four kingdoms, and they’re often gone, curating their collections. And then there’s the Schnees and their money - Atlas becomes a day trip to them.

Sun and Neptune are already off to university, studying in Vacuo; they’d liked the dryness of the desert, the hot sun, the absence of forests and fog. They video chat with the girls on their scrolls every Thursday, updating them on their classes, their parties, their friends. It’s almost a relief to Blake to see them living normal lives, just so she knows it can be done. 

Freedom is so close to them. Opportunity awaits, or whatever that cliche phrase is - they research every possible option and every possible angle, from abroad programs to popular tourist destinations to simply sorting the list of colleges by ‘furthest distance away’, though they’re turned off that idea pretty quickly when it’s a small place in a far corner of Anima that specializes in agriculture. 

What’s certain, though, is that they’re mostly going together. 

Weiss and Pyrrha apply to about twenty of the same places, and set out making a pros-and-cons list for each which ultimate culminates in a Google Slides presentation; Jaune and Ruby, who’s a genius and gets her G.E.D., really like the serenity of Haven, all its waterfalls and cliffsides. 

Blake and Yang settle on Vale.

‘City’ is the biggest checkmark, right next to ‘on the ocean’, followed by ‘program options’. Neither of them are completely sure what they want to study, and don’t want to go somewhere specialized for something they might end up hating completely. 

Vale is big and busy and bustling; it doesn’t have time to care about them and who they are to the fate of the world. They won’t get weird looks or whispers or be recognized on sight. They can laugh off their marks as matching tattoos and never explain any further. They can be _Yang and Blake,_ not _Yang or Blake._ Not a sad song and a funeral march. 

And they love it. They get a tiny apartment on the fourth floor overlooking the docks; Blake studies the classics and Yang flirts with photography, and then engineering, which seems to stick - she likes figuring out the _why_ of things, what makes them tick, and what can be done to make them stop.

“It’s strange,” Blake starts one evening when they’re cuddled up together on their couch; Yang’s head in her lap, Blake’s fingers in her hair. Some random sitcom plays on in the background. “I feel like this was meant for us, you know? Like, _this_ life. Not the one we left behind.” 

“Mm.” Yang tilts her head, cheek against Blake’s stomach, eyelashes fluttering closed. “I know what you mean. Like - in another life, this _is_ us, all the time.”

“Yeah.” Blake’s hand slips to the shell of her ear, tracing the curve, thumbs a line down her jaw. “No fucking blood-curse. No magic. No rituals.” 

“Fuck them,” Yang says. “Lucky gay bitches.” 

“What do you think the alternate-us do?” Blake asks, and this line of questioning makes sense coming from a Classics major - oh, the mythology she’s read. “I think parallel-universe Yang kept to photography. But you took another way in - like, I don’t know, investigative journalism.” 

“Oh, that’s cool,” Yang says, warming up to the idea, eyelids blinking open. “Well - I think we meet here. Alternate-universe Blake is _also_ in investigative journalism, but you minor in politics or something. You’re going to change the world.” She catches Blake’s listless hand in her own and kisses it. “In the best way possible.”

“You’re right,” Blake says, grinning at her. “They _are_ lucky gay bitches. They don’t know what we went through in this universe to let them be happy forever in that one.”

“Maybe it’s the other way around,” Yang says, and presses her lips to each one of Blake’s knuckles. “Maybe they went through something there that lets us be happy forever here. You know - the unknowable karmic universe, and all that shit. We balance it out.” 

The sitcom laugh-track echoes in the background; outside, it’s started snowing. “In that case,” Blake says, “I think we’re happy in all of them.”

Maybe that’s the true purpose of the conversation, as silly and baseless as it might be; maybe it’s just nice knowing that in some other life, they’re two normal people who get it right. And maybe that’s enough.

Blake dips her head to kiss her; Yang rises, meeting her halfway. That’s the dynamic between them in a nutshell. “Yeah,” Yang says, smiling softly as she lays back down. “Me, too.”

They love Vale; they love their quaint and comfortable apartment, their coffee shops and corner stops, their bodegas and bars and restaurants. They love the life they’ve built, and at times, even love the life they lead to get here. 

They love every inch of that city, right up until the second Adam destroys it for them.)


	3. Chapter 3

Follow me, Yang had said, and interlaced their fingers. 

They traipse back through the woods, following the river until they reach the lake. Yang knows this land better than anyone, and she should, considering her father owns it all - she’s spent years cataloguing the water, the fields, the forests. The house comes into view in the distance, smoke blowing from the chimney. They’re lucky the snow hasn’t started, but staring at the sky, they’re down to hours to avoid it. 

“Tai isn’t here,” Yang says quietly, opening the back door. “He’s at Qrow’s, probably drinking.” 

“Well,” Blake says, voice equally as low, “I guess I can’t blame him.” 

“No, Yang agrees, and leads her up the stairs, or maybe she’s just reluctant to drop Blake’s hand now that she’s held it again. “Neither can I. And I used to.”

She pushes open the door to her room, and Blake’s heart expands until it’s too big for her chest, too heavy for her body. The purple wall, the love letters, the string lights - it’s been almost ten years since she’s seen this room, but Blake at seventeen could’ve been here yesterday. 

Time is funny like that, she thinks, especially when it coincides with memorials. 

Of course Tai never touched it; he probably couldn’t bring himself to, considering he had the possibility of losing her. Everything exactly as she left it, though dusted off and kept clean. Working clocks, well-oiled doors - it’s like a still-frame of the day she left. Like whatever part of her died, Tai decided to keep safe.

“He did love me,” Yang says, watching her take it in. She’s already ridden this train of thought all the way to its depressing end. “I always knew that. But it’s - it’s strange being told like this.” 

“People don’t always tell you they love you in exactly the ways you want them to,” Blake says, idly running her fingers over the scrunchy on the back of the doorknob. Yang momentarily pauses as she unties her boots, fingers stumbling over a knot. 

“Yeah,” she says, and meets Blake’s eyes. “I guess they don’t.” 

She leaves her boots on the rug, tucks her feet cross-legged underneath her. She looks out-of-place in her own room, like she’s physically outgrown the space, too tall and beautiful and hopeless. Like she might _keep_ growing, overtaking the bed and pressing into the walls, cracking the ceiling and tearing the roof; like she might take one giant leap from the earth and throw herself off. 

“I can tell you now,” Blake says, wanting to tie her down. _Stay with me,_ but not in as many weak words. “If you want.”

“You can tell me the way I want you to, you mean,” Yang says. 

“No,” Blake says, stepping forward, arms loosely at her sides; her coat hangs off a shoulder. “I’ve said what I believe, and you know why I believe it. But it doesn’t change the fact that I love you now, and I’ll show you, if you let me.” 

From that first day in the locker rooms to now; as if Yang could ever tell her no, or ever truly imagine wanting to. The thoughts in her head aren’t about the past anymore, but the future - whatever little of it she has left - and Blake has become herself gorgeously, effortlessly: lithe and lissome, long black hair spiraling down her back, golden eyes blinking slowly, lazily. 

If the circumstances were any different, oh, they’d ruin each other spectacularly. 

Yang lifts a hand, crooks a finger.

“Then show me,” she says, and Blake lets her coat fall to the floor.

\--

(There’s a nightmare Blake never stops reliving, with a picture so defined it’s like it’s preserved somewhere deep inside of her brain, and called forth in the darkest moments of the night when she has nothing left to replace it with. Nothing happy, nothing light, nothing beautiful. Only the color red and skin that melts off the bone.

It always starts out the same:

Freshly-graduated from Beacon University with a B.A. in Classical Civilizations and English Literature, she’s just returning home from a meeting with her old Head of Department, who’d wanted her to submit a paper to a literary journal he edited with a few other colleagues. It’s only about seven in the evening, and the streets are busy as she traces the familiar route back to the apartment she shares with Yang. She’s done this walk a hundred times, often passing the same people. Busy cities are sometimes more familiar than her old small town.

She’s feeling good; proud of her work and accomplishments and the life she’s building, proud of her love and how she’s kept it safe. Some days, she fails to remember the curse at all.

Sharp. Crisp. The image of herself, walking down the sidewalk. She forgets to give the buildings windows. The moon is nowhere to be found. She watches herself take the alleyway shortcut she always uses home and wishes she could scream. 

Adam is waiting in the middle of it. Raw details. The strange sheath by his waist. The odd mask, like he’s joined a cult. The horns somehow longer and thicker than she remembers. 

She stands struck in shock. The brick buildings around her cement themselves into walls that meet each others’ corners, locking her in a room. The pavement falls away, one slab at a time, and beneath her is the stone of the ritual site, obsidian and stained and cracked. 

Their first words to each other are lost, because they aren’t important. But then he unsheathes his sword, red metal and glistening, and then she takes a single step back. The preying begins. 

“You know, Blake,” he says, twirling the sword in his hands, “if you’d just been a good girl, and done exactly what you were supposed to, none of this would’ve happened.”

So small and childish and afraid when she responds. “What?” 

“You have a duty, Blake,” he says, and she shudders against the way he says her name, like tying a length of rope. “You have a very important task to do, and she’s gone and given you ideas. Dangerous ideas.” 

“How did you find us?” she asks, but her voice breaks in too many places to be anything other than comical to him. “What are you talking about?” 

“Don’t play dumb with me,” he snarls, taking an aggressive step, and she flinches. “Thinking you can _ignore_ the pact you made.” Voice gaining in volume, in emotion. “Thinking you’re above it, when so many others have died before you.” 

She never sees it coming, despite being inches away from him - his hand reaching out, roughly grasping her shoulder; the blade sinking into her stomach, so fast and smooth she almost doesn’t feel it - anesthetized, poisoned, primed for devouring. 

“Is your stupid, insignificant little life more important than the world?” He twists the sword as he hisses the words, finding pleasure in the squeak that leaves her mouth, the way her hands instinctively move to push him off. She lacks power, she lacks courage, she lacks conscience.

“You could have had everything, Blake,” Adam says conversationally, as she trembles around the sword. His odd, red sword, a metal she’s never seen, a hatred she’s never felt. “You could have kept everything. All you had to do was help one of you die.” 

And then she feels it - her heart throbbing, tightening. The footsteps vibrate up her bones. Behind her, where she can’t see, can’t stop, can’t warn. 

“Get _away_ from her!” she hears Yang scream, and Adam lets her body crumple to the ground. 

She’s gone again, away, away, away. The details are so vivid they become unbearable. This is how she knows she’s dreaming. Yang’s severed arm falls only feet from her face, and the bleeding never stops; it fills the alleyway - dark, congealed liquid - until Adam forces her jaw off its hinges and drowns her in it. Only black in her eyes and lungs of a monster. 

“This is your fault,” Adam whispers as she gurgles, missing a tongue now, prying her head back and forcing her to watch Yang’s body twitch. “And years from now, when one of you gets the death mark on their wrist, you’ll be the one to blame for how much it hurts when you find you can’t escape it.” 

He shoves her back down, her cheek cracking against a hard material; bones break the surface around her, the corpses of a thousand years’ worth of victims. Adam laughs until his jaw snaps and hangs loose from his skull, skin tearing like clay.

She knows she’s dreaming. The details are vivid, but many of them are wrong. Words out of order, much less blood - her brain struggles to protect her and punish her simultaneously. Yes, of course Yang was unconscious when Adam told you of your worthlessness, of your ego. Of course she didn’t hear the truth of every hideous word and find them all to be true, just as you had done. Of course she didn’t suffer. 

Blake has the dream every night she’s in the hospital, and it’s so severe they keep her sedated. Ruby is there, or Blake’s hallucinating her, too - saying something about a clean cut and a prosthetic. She gets discharged after a week and she doesn’t look back.)

\--

It’s the first time she’s slept soundly in years. It isn’t all at once; they spend too much of the night bare-skinned and stripped down, bodies pressed together and coalescing, to catch anything other than momentary lulls, but it’s enough. 

Two days left. They aren’t soft and supple and tender anymore. Yang works three fingers into her, prosthetic hand curled around her hip, and makes her ride them. Leaves bruises on her neck and nips at her chest, tongue flicking at a nipple. Something about the middle of the night and Blake at her mercy always seem to combine, give her a strange glow and a red eye, so hot to the touch she should be feverish. 

Blake doesn’t let her get away with it forever, but almost - Yang fucks her for hours straight, makes her come until she begs for it to stop - rolling tides and clashing waves, a steady erosion, beat after beat after beat - _please,_ Blake says, and Yang only smirks, thumb pressing down on her clit. There’s something addicting about being pushed past her breaking point - that kind of intense, endless release - like she’s unlocking herself, dormant and now awakening. The shadows of the room seem to spread to her. She feels like sinking, falling, rising into them all at once.

Yang’s turn, pushed back against the sheets, thighs held open. Blake’s hair in a ponytail, mouth against her cunt. Licking her slowly and patiently until she’s writhing. Tongue coated, jaw wet, sheets ruined. But Yang only says her name, over and over and over; _Blake,_ she whispers, frustrated, fingers knotting in the sheets; _Blake_ , one hand slipping between her ears, forcing her head lower. _Blake._ She starts to grind her hips, aching for pressure. So hot the snow outside is becoming rain. 

Blake’s irises are too bright in a dim room. Yang swears she’s evaporating. There’s something wrong with them, but they’ve waited too long to stop.

\--

(Yang’s recovery is a long one.

She has trouble sleeping in an empty bed. She calls Blake’s voicemail just to remember it was real. The days all feel like one, an endless cycle of looking and letting go. Weiss and Pyrrha come down from Atlas, unscarred.

Yang accepts the gnawing, tugging at her spine - the splinters holding her heart together - the constant presence of darkness. This, too, must be part of the curse.

Her recovery is long, but she doesn’t remember most of it.

Maybe that’s for the best.)

\--

The morning almost feels normal, or perhaps that’s just the denial. 

“I told Qrow I’d visit him today,” Yang says, pouring herself a thermos of coffee. He lives on their property, but it’s still a ten minute walk to get there. “And I’m guessing you should finally go see your parents.” 

“Probably,” Blake says, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, knowing she’ll do nothing of the sort. “Can I come back?” 

“Depends,” Yang says, turning around and leaning against the counter. “Are you fucking me because you think I won’t want to die if I remember how good pussy is?” 

Blake snorts into her tea and chokes, pressing her knuckles to her nose as she coughs. “ _No,_ ” she manages, half-laughing. “I love you. I’ll say it as many times as you want.”

The smile that spreads across Yang’s face is one she never thought she’d see again, so warm and soft it makes her want to cry. But it takes on a sadness at the end, like she’s pitying Blake for something she doesn’t understand yet. 

“Blake,” she says gently. “This doesn’t change anything.” 

“You want to live,” Blake says. 

“Yeah,” Yang says, and sighs, tugging her bottom lip into her mouth. “I do. But I think you’re underestimating...I mean, not everyone is _you,_ Blake. Maybe you love me too much, and it isn’t affecting you yet. But they’re not all you.” 

That’s the first thing to curb her high; Yang is speaking like she _knows_ something, like Blake’s still stuck with a blank piece of canvas integral to the perspective of the whole picture. “What do you mean?” she asks, furrowing her eyebrows. 

“Go talk to them,” Yang says, and grabs her beanie hanging off a hook by the back door. She tosses Blake another smile. “You don’t need me there. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and I look forward to keeping my life.” 

It’s so vague, so unbelievable, so worrisome - how can Blake feel nothing, but the others feel something so strong it compels them to kill her? She can’t wrap her mind around it, and wonders if it’s too full of too many other things, Yang’s laugh and touch and fire - how it felt to love her after five years of letting her go - her vision is blurred, her skull is collapsing, the fog is creeping in--

She shoves open Neptune’s door, and finds herself the last to arrive. 

In another life, Blake thinks, this is a family reunion: they’re only smiling and laughing, and commenting on how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, what’ve they been up to, how was the anniversary, congratulations on the PhD; in another life they’re happy to be together, and it’s somebody’s wedding. In another life, they only reunite for celebration.

For a brief, beautiful moment, Blake sees them all at sixteen, seventeen - gathered in Neptune’s apartment, debating over board games and card games and drinking games, piling themselves across his large sectional and flipping coins over movies, having brunch and editing college essays. But she blinks and the vision is gone, and they’re who they are now, twenty-seven and tired and terrified.

She’s seen them over the years, spare visits and vacations, but it’s still a shockwave seeing them all together: Weiss and Pyrrha are closest to her, leaning over the kitchen island, and they look as elegant as ever with their high ponytails and designer coats; Jaune’s just behind them, one shoulder resting against the corner pillar dividing the hallway from the kitchen and living room, and he’s short-haired, a little more filled out but still carrying that same awkward energy. Sun and Neptune are the two in the kitchen - she catches them as she steps further down the hallway - and she’d seen them barely six months ago in Vacuo, not that they ever change, anyway. 

And finally, Ruby. The one person who loves Yang as much as she does, albeit differently. 

She’s slightly apart from the rest of them, half-sitting on the back of the couch with her arms crossed. Troubled, but so is the expression of everyone in the room, all looking at Blake. 

“Hey,” Blake says, but the enormity of the moment betrays her voice. 

“Blake,” Weiss breathes out, and immediately pulls her into a crushing hug. If there’s more she wants to add, she can’t seem to get it out; Pyrrha follows suit, merely rubbing a hand up and down her back while Weiss embraces her. 

Ruby is the one who doesn’t waste time. “Were you with her last night?” she asks, and they all know exactly what she’s implying. 

There isn’t time to be coy and embarrassed. “Yes.” 

“How is she?” Sun asks, tail uncharacteristically down. “Did you - you know, knock some sense into each other?” 

“Uh,” Blake says, so caught off-guard by the phrasing that she’s actually amused by it. “Something like that.” 

“And?” Ruby prompts, now straightening up. “Does she still want to die?” 

“No,” Blake says slowly, and her certainty doesn’t waver. “She...she doesn’t want to die.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’,” Weiss says. 

“But,” Blake allows, shifting nervously; too many pairs of eyes, not enough room for error, “she thinks you’re all going to go through with it anyway.” The statement rings out in the silence, where none of them even breathe, let alone answer. So she probes, “Are you?” 

The question seems to spring them all out of whatever disbelieving daze they’d been hurled into. “Of course we aren’t going to kill her,” Weiss snaps, rolling her eyes. “God, Blake, pull yourself together. Who do you think we are?” 

“Uh, people whose families made a pact to sacrifice themselves for the good of humankind?” Neptune offers sarcastically on her behalf. “Or something like that?” 

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Blake says, meeting Ruby’s eyes. There’s still danger in them, but she isn’t quite sure why - like Ruby knows something she doesn’t, too. “So, great. We don’t kill her.” 

“Obviously,” Sun says. “We can’t _kill Yang._ Weiss, maybe--”

“Ha- _ha,_ ” she snarks back, but actually has a curl at the corner of her mouth. “Watch it, Wukong, or we’ll sacrifice you instead.” 

“I’d like to see you try, Ice Queen.” 

“Hey!” 

Sixteen, seventeen - they’ve grown up, but not away. Even Blake finds herself smiling. It feels _achievable,_ now - like all their outrageous, naive childhood dreams finally have the opportunity to come true. They won’t continue the chain of sacrifice. They’ll deal with the consequences together. 

“That’s what we’re _actually_ here to discuss,” Pyrrha says, as if continuing Blake’s thought process aloud; she’d missed a bit of conversation. “We can’t kill Yang, but we need to prepare for what might happen when we don’t.”

“Of - of _course_ we can’t kill her,” Jaune finally voices, and shifts his spine, like there’s a joint he’s trying to crack, a weight sitting on his shoulders. Except he isn’t as certain as Weiss, or even Pyrrha. He’s hesitant and unsettled, and when Ruby glances to him, the discontent in her eyes cements itself there. 

If only the sentence ended after that - if only he’d kept his mouth shut - if only he’d moved on and hadn’t given the feeling a name. Because what he says next coats her blood in glycerol - lets it run painfully, even as her veins freeze over. 

“But - but don’t you - don’t you _feel_ that?” he asks, and stares down at his hands. “It’s so - heavy _._ It’s so _heavy_.” 

\--

(Jaune visits Yang once after she loses her arm.

Only once, and it isn’t even on purpose. They’re both in Argus at the same time; he’s visiting his sister, and Yang’s visiting Weiss and Pyrrha. 

They meet at a cafe out of obligation, really. They’re friends, sure, but not close enough that he can ask what happened, and not close enough that she’d tell him even if he did. So they exchange pleasantries; he tells her about his sister and her wife, about the last time he saw Ruby, and she talks about Pyrrha’s new job as a self-defense trainer for children with trauma; Sun, who taught martial arts to children, liked to say she ‘copied him.’ They both laugh about that.

But there’s something unwieldy to Yang that wasn’t there before. Not as simple as a burden, but like an acceptance of one; like whatever she’s carrying is so big it bends the space around her. 

He can’t help himself. “Yang,” he says. “Are you okay?” 

She only observes him for a moment, detached but looking through a microscope. He wonders what she can see, or what he can and isn’t supposed to. 

“You feel it, don’t you?” she says bluntly. “When you look at me.” 

He isn’t sure what ‘it’ is, only that he can’t lie to her. “Yeah.” 

“Yeah,” she says, more to herself than him, and drops her eyes to her prosthetic. “So do I.”)

\--

It’d been a strange, lurching, halting conversation after that. They couldn’t get anything done, let alone plan for something there’s no existing record of; they’d called it a night, promising to meet again the next day. The last day. 

She takes out her scroll, enters her fingerprint, and is surprised by the messages that pop up on the screen; not from Yang, or her family, but from someone she’d left behind and tried to cut ties with. For the best, she’d thought to herself; she wasn’t sure what she was coming home to do, but she knew she wouldn’t be the same after.

She pulls up her voicemail and listens.

“ _Blake,_ ” a voice says frantically into the receiver, “ _look, I don’t care about - I understand why you never returned my feelings, and why you left without saying anything. I’m not bitter or something. But I have information - about your town, about your curse, about all of it - and I’m not going to let you destroy yourself. Not again. I’m trying to get on a flight. Don’t do anything!”_

\--

(Blake meets Ilia at twenty-three, a year after she and Yang break up. Without classes, her mind is dangerously unoccupied by distractions - Menagerie’s got a great art program, and all she can seem to draw is Yang’s face, her hands, her smile. But she’s good at it, and that’s what her professors care about.

Ilia is a T.A. for the journalism department, recently graduated and working on expanding her senior project for a published piece. They’re always in line at the campus’s coffee shop the same time, and on a particularly rainy morning where spare tables are in short supply, Ilia approaches hers by the front window.

“Hey,” she says, grinning sheepishly and holding an iced vanilla latte in hand. “Mind if I sit with you? We don’t have to talk, or anything.” 

“Go ahead,” Blake says, gesturing to the empty seat. “Better you than him.” She subtly nods in the direction of a brunette boy, currently ordering a black coffee at the counter. Ilia carefully glances over her shoulder as she sets her bag on the floor. “He’s in my art history class - he keeps giving me different drawings with his number on them.” 

“Take it you’re not interested,” Ilia says, and, well - it’s not as if she’s never _noticed_ Blake; the girl’s gorgeous. “In just him, or men in general?” 

And Blake pauses, a miniscule beat, before her expression snaps shut. The lines of her face seem tight, and underneath - Ilia doesn’t know how to assign it meaning. Something hidden, as if in shadow. Something sinister and aching. Blake says, “I don’t date.” Hesitates again. “Anyone.” 

“Okay,” Ilia says, trying to be as relaxed as possible. She doesn’t want to freak out the one cool person with a spare table in their university’s incredibly busy coffee shop. “So you’re an art major?” 

“Yes,” Blake says, and unwinds slightly. “You?”

“I just graduated,” Ilia answers, and can’t stop the stab of pride that accompanies the words. “I’m an assistant in the Journalism department while I look for a job.”

“Congratulations,” Blake says warmly, and whatever her reservations about dating, she has no trouble with sentiment. “Are you from around here?”

The faint blush dusts warmly across Ilia’s darker cheeks. “Thanks. And no, I’m from Menagerie, but grew up in Atlas. What about you?” 

“I’m from Idel,” Blake drops casually, and Ilia’s heart skips, stops, hurdles. No. There’s no _way._ “It’s, like, this small town a hundred miles east of Vale.” 

“I’ve heard of it,” Ilia says, thinking of her notebook in her bag, the cut-out articles, the photographs of missing people. She won’t let this opportunity go. “Not sure _why,_ though. So why’d you leave? I feel like it’s rarer to leave a small town than to stay.” 

The corner of Blake’s mouth curls at an edge, and one of her ears flicks involuntarily. “You’re definitely right about that,” she replies, her gaze dropping as she bites the inside of her lip briefly. It’s a tell. Every action is a sign; Ilia leans in, chin resting in her hand. “I just wanted to see the world,” she continues, sighing, and her eyes fall to the window. “I wanted to do something with my life, I guess.”

“And art?” Ilia prompts, now deeply invested in literally any bit of information Blake is willing to tell her. She doesn’t think further than that - doesn’t think there’s a direct connection, doesn’t think she’s getting a glimpse of the truth, until--

Blake swallows; lips full and pink, dark hair in a messy bun, ankles crossed under the table, and fingernails almost bitten to the ends. She’s good at hiding, but Ilia’s better at deciphering. 

“I wanted to create something,” she says quietly. “Something that’d live on long after me.” 

She raises her coffee cup to her mouth, and the sleeve of her sweater drops down ever so slightly: On her wrist is a strange symbol, tattooed into her flesh.)

\--

 _One more day,_ Blake thinks, clings to Yang like she can stop time itself. Yang only allows it, cradling her and in her arms and kissing her between the ears. Ilia’s message loops around her head like a ribbon, like a noose. What could she possibly know that they don’t? It’s false hope, and Blake has enough of her own as it is.

“You get it now, don’t you?” Yang whispers. “What I meant this morning.” 

Blake doesn’t answer. Because if she says _yes,_ she’s afraid she’ll make it true. 

\--

(It takes a long time for the truth to come out. It always does.

The problem is that Ilia starts to _love_ Blake. And when you love someone, it becomes an active decision to dig up their graves, empty their skeletons of closets. It becomes an extended hand. It becomes an offer. _Let me help you. We all have burdens. Let me carry some of yours, just for awhile._

Her pages of research pile up, but the folders stay hidden in the bottom of her drawers. The Google documents are password-protected. She doesn’t write down the smaller details Blake lets slip anymore. She doesn’t ask about the blonde girl who fills Blake’s sketchbook; someone never spoken of but constantly immortalized in brutal silence, Ilia knows, is not someone she can compete with. 

But when she gets a job at the local newspaper, and Blake comes over to celebrate with a bottle of wine, that doesn’t stop Ilia from imagining what it’d be like to kiss her. 

They’re twenty-six when she almost takes the risk for the chance of the reward. A conversation, maybe, just a broach of the topic. That’s all she wants. Baby steps. Starting small. 

Except Blake isn’t alone outside of her apartment, where the two of them had planned to meet before brunch. Ilia’s walk slows. She seems to be arguing heatedly with a blond boy, but in a voice low enough that they can’t be overheard.

Here’s where it unravels: Ilia _recognizes_ this boy. 

Not because Blake’s ever talked about him, or showed Ilia pictures, or anything as innocuous of the sort - no, Ilia knows him because of the research she’s done into Blake’s own life. Into the town she’s from. Into the string of disappearances. 

His name’s Sun Wukong; his family has ties all over the globe, whether it’s in travel, property, or investments. And even from a distance, Ilia can see a matching tattoo on the inside of his wrist.

“You don’t think I’ve _tried?”_ She hears Blake hiss as she approaches behind them. “I’ve talked to her, Sun. I’ve - I’ve called.” 

“So that’s it, huh?” He shoots back, clearly annoyed with her. “You throw away all those years - your _only good ones_ \- because of how guilty you feel? Come on, Blake! She’d die for you. You know that!” 

“Well maybe that’s the problem!” Blake lets slip, outrage and instantaneous regret in the revelation. It doesn’t mean much to Ilia, but Sun narrows in, all eyes and focus. 

“So _that’s_ it, huh,” he repeats, only now his tone cools. “That’s what you’re afraid of.” 

Blake tugs her bottom lip into her mouth, an instant tell, and Ilia accidentally kicks a loose rock down the pavement. Blake’s ears twitch, and she spins around. There’s a relief in her expression, underneath a dawning recognition. Oh, there’s no escape now.

“I’ll talk to you later, Sun,” she says without looking at him. He doesn’t argue. He’s whittled her down to her core and there’s no point in denying what he sees, and what Blake wishes she didn’t. What Ilia doesn’t understand and isn’t sure anymore if she even wants to.

They’d been kids when they’d met, Ilia thinks. Twenty-two, twenty-three. And Blake had been so secretive, so guarded, and so - so--

Not afraid. Not resigned. But aware.

Ilia had never met someone as _aware_ of life as Blake was - every inhale and exhale of the people surrounding her, every leaf shuffled by the wind, every cloud crawling across the sky. Aware of beautiful things, aware of ugly things, aware of stranger things still: the length of Ilia’s lifeline, etched into her palm; the exact expiration date of everything in her fridge, even without checking it; medically, the lengths it’d take to die from heartbreak.

There are other things, too. The screen of her scroll, always face-up as if there’s an important call she’s scared to miss. The tattoo, small black lines and curves on the inside of her wrist. Those two never go away - even, Ilia imagines, even when she sleeps. 

She’d asked, once, what it meant. Blake had lowered her eyes and said quietly, “It’s a reminder of a commitment.” She’d paused, continued humorlessly, “As if I could ever forget.”

That’s not what Blake’ll say this time, though. Ilia stops pretending. She stares at Sun’s retreating back, catches how Blake moves her weight around her body as if uncertain of how to balance herself. As if she’d stepped away from the earth, only to return to it spinning slightly faster. 

“I think,” Ilia starts carefully, “that you’ve been keeping a secret from me.” She scans Blake’s face, looks for cracks, the creak of door, the latch of a window. She needs to force it open without breaking it. If there’s no way in, she’ll make one herself. “What happened to all the missing people from your hometown, Blake?” 

And she achieves it, not that it feels good - as if learning a dark secret ever does. Blake’s eyes fill with tears, and with a last, shuddering breath, she says, “Not here.” 

Blake’s apartment had always been charming and stylish, but strangely detached, impersonal. She doesn’t frame pictures of her family or friends; not a single thing to remind her of home takes pride of place. There are no gifts, no trinkets that can’t be explained by her own purchases. It’s as if one day, her past had packed its things into boxes and moved out. 

The only two things Ilia knows for certain are that Blake isn’t estranged from her family - they call every so often, checking in - and that she had a girlfriend, once. Something she let slip after getting a little too tipsy at a bar. She hadn’t elaborated, and Ilia hadn’t asked. 

But today, she beckons Ilia inside of her building, back up the stairs, into her apartment, and tells her everything.

By the end of it, Ilia almost wishes she hadn’t.)

\--

Here’s how Yang knows she’s going to die:

The pressure in her chest is so great - ribcage shrinking around her lungs, the threat of puncture, veins closing themselves off - she thinks her heart may give out even if she doesn’t. It’s like whatever’s inside of her wants her body to rebel. Wants to quelch her survival instincts. Wants her to embrace death wholeheartedly, to know that any fight is futile. 

It’s hard not to believe something so loud, and so constant.

Her minutes tick away, blood dripping through an hourglass. Blake is there, too in love to feel anything other than her own guilt and defiance. Yang can’t get her head around the day - she thinks they have breakfast, thinks they take a walk, thinks she talks to Ruby. The sky starts disappearing. Everywhere she looks, there’s fog and a pair of red eyes, glinting at her through the darkness. Whatever their town is, it has teeth. 

Qrow comes to her, but grows wings and flies away. Raven follows him, sitting on a branch and watching her. Summer crawls out of the earth, skin tight and waxy and bloodless, and smiles with rotting teeth. Her skin is burning up, but underneath the stone it will be cool, and comforting, and dark. 

All of this happens inside of her head. She talks like nothing’s wrong. Blake and Ruby leave together, and the second she’s alone, the flower on her wrist blooms bigger, tilts its face towards hers like it’s looking at her. Its roots burrow into her veins and drink. She knows she’s going to die because it’s a flower that only grows in graveyards, and that’s what she’s becoming.

\--

(At twenty-six years old, Yang gets Raven’s number from Qrow, who occasionally keeps in contact with his tormented, crazed twin sister. 

_What did it feel like to kill Summer?_ she types. _Would you have killed me, too?_

She never gets a reply, not that she expects to. 

Raven blocks her number.)

\--

Blake and Ruby meet with the group again; Yang doesn’t want to listen to them talk about how to avoid her death and they can’t blame her. She’s doing what she can. She’s breathing. 

Everyone appears exhausted, no matter how much coffee they drink; Neptun’s got a pounding headache that aspirin can’t cure. Pyrrha’s neck aches, and her muscles are too tight. Jaune says he feels like something is living inside of him.

They try not to take it as a sign. 

That night, Blake feels exactly like she did the night Yang’s mark bloomed. 

Like if it never becomes morning, she’ll never have to face whatever darkness has started eating at the rest of them. Jaune’s words haunt her; she dreams about Adam again, his hand on his sword, his boot pressing down on her spine until it cracks. Yang shakes her awake and holds her, but her skin is so hot it nearly burns to the touch. She’s turning into a forest fire, built for destruction. A bomb. A goodbye.

“Are you scared?” Blake asks, and her voice shakes the same way the leaves fall from trees. A question with too much weight and an answer she’s afraid has changed. “To die?”

It’s this and this alone that breaks whatever walls held Yang up, whatever supports that were keeping her standing. 

“The only thing I’m afraid of is being without you,” she whispers, and the way she kisses Blake is nothing like the first time they’d exchanged this question - it’s the reality of it, desperate and trembling and salty - like pressing her lips to the ocean.

\--

(I love you _,_ Ilia confesses once, a day after she learns the truth. 

Don’t, Blake answers, turning away. Loving someone who may be fated to die isn’t romantic, Ilia. It’s just fucked up. 

What hurt you, Blake?

Me, she says. I hurt me.)

\--

November 21st is the darkest, coldest day of winter on record in twenty-five years. 

The snow has stuck, but it’s almost overwhelmed by the fog, edges blending so neatly it’s hard to tell where the ground stops and the air begins. Unnaturally thick, strangely moving. Most of the town goes about their day regardless, driving slowly down the icy roads, bundled up to protect them from the bitter chill. 

Yang can’t even feel it, and she melts snow where she walks.

The ritual site is deep in the woods on Tai’s property, past the lake and veering off-course from the river. It’d never be found if it wasn’t being looked for, which is she’s sure is the point. An ancient place full of ancient relics and ancient ghosts. A place they’ve all been taken to over the years, one at a time, and told about their curse. 

And they’re all gathered there now, for reasons they can’t explain, only that they didn’t have a choice. 

It looks exactly the same as it always has; the huge obsidian stone embedded in the ground, with a shallow split down the middle. The large hollow tree, still clinging to all its red leaves despite the bare, shivering forest surrounding it. 

And the knife, looking as though it’s never been touched, resting at the base of it. 

Hilt made of bone. Blade unstained, like it’s never tasted skin. Lying to her, calling her pretty, coming for her throat.

“Why did we come?” Weiss whispers, the first to speak. She clenches her coat tightly around herself. “Why are we here?” 

“Because we had to be,” Neptune says, blank and empty. 

“I wasn’t even gonna leave the house,” Sun says, staring at the stone, unable to process. “I - don’t know how we got here.” 

“This doesn’t change anything,” Ruby says softly. “I’m not killing you.” 

Someone is screaming. Yang looks at each of their faces in turn, all gathered around the stone - all except Blake, still paces away at the treeline, rebelling harder than any of them. Someone is screaming, but none of their mouths are open, and Yang tilts her head, searching for the sound. 

Someone is screaming and it’s coming from the stone. Or from the tree, or the very sky above them. Someone is screaming and it’s Summer, climbing out of the dirt. Someone is screaming and it’s her, losing control of her own death.

No, no; she won’t. She _won’t._ Their curse might be taking her life from her, but it won’t take her death, too. She focuses on Blake, ten feet away. Traces the pretty shape of her face, her pink lips, high cheekbones, gold-leaf irises. She focuses on feeling - on the tangible, the conceptual, the memory - how deeply it hurt to lose her, but how worth it it’d been to find her at all. 

She’s going to die, but she won’t be bribed by illusions and hallucinations, magic and monsters. She’ll die focusing on the faces of the people she loves who love her, and few people could ask for better.

“Well, it’s been a blast,” she says suddenly, stepping into the center of the stone and cracking her neck. “Have a shot at the bar for me later. Tequila. The expensive shit.” 

They know she isn’t stupid - she’s terrified, but more than that, she’s trying to put them at ease with her death. And maybe that’s the final straw for those of them who’d been on the fence. Maybe it’s the way she smiles at Weiss, who’s already on the verge of tears. Maybe it’s the way Ruby trembles, too stubborn to fall to her knees. Maybe it’s the way Blake won’t move from the trees several feet away, like the ground they’re on is a cage instead of a conduit.

“Yang,” Pyrrha says, always the most level headed among them, “I think you know this isn’t going to happen.” 

“It has to,” she answers shortly. 

“Why!?” Blake asks, verging on hysterical, and the raw hope in her voice is like tearing bark from branches. “Why do _we_ have to pay for - for something we didn’t even _agree_ to? I didn’t make this deal! None of us did!”

“She’s right,” Weiss says, and her face is set but her cheeks are damp. “I didn’t ask for this. I’d trade in everything I have in a second for you.”

“Stop it,” Yang says quietly. The wind picks up, but the fog stays at the edges of the treeline as if an invisible wall stops it from creeping any closer. “Don’t do this. Please. Don’t do this.” 

And for a moment, nobody does. An uneasiness settles around them - the time is drawing closer, and every second, the pressure to do what is required of them expands from the insides of their bones, porous and poisonous. The air gains weight and wraps its hands around their necks. Weiss opens her mouth again, but can only swallow, hard and forceful. 

Yang is going to die, just like every sacrifice before her. Just like Summer. Because they understand, now, that none of them are strong enough to fight the force compelling them otherwise. 

The fall leaves crunch under Blake’s boots as she steps towards the circle where the rest of them are already positioned. In the end, she can’t resist it, either. Or so Yang thinks. 

It’s so _archaic_ ; that’s what Yang decides to unravel before she’s gone. The stone she’s on is blacker than anything she’s ever seen, with a strange script in a language lost to time - staring down at it gives her an odd sense of vertigo, like she’s about to fall into a void, become nothing. Like she never existed at all. She’ll slip right through the crack of it, deep into the earth, and sleep.

“Tell them I ran away,” she says suddenly, just as Neptune reaches for the knife. “Tell them I’m still out there, somewhere. Tell them I went wild - last you heard I was in a jungle. I was climbing the tallest mountain in existence. I went on a hike that spanned the entire coastline. Tell them you don’t know where I am because I created a new identity in every city I lived in, and I never stayed more than a year. Tell them I went to the bottom of the ocean. Tell them I went to space. Tell them I left and became someone.”

The sob that tears itself from Blake’s throat is so guttural and heart-wrenching that Yang can’t help but turn to look at her, and that’s the beginning of her unbecoming: she’d been determined to keep it together, to die with a grace she’d never quite managed while alive. But Yang meets Blake’s tear-filled eyes and she can only think of a promise she’s breaking; can only think of the two of them at seventeen, curled underneath the sheets. Can only hear herself murmuring, _I’ll never leave you, even if it’s me._

Childish words, she’d thought later. This is a duty. This is an honor. This is, when all of the other descriptions fail to be true enough to warrant her own death, a necessity. 

Behind her, Jaune guides the tip of the knife to his palm. 

She doesn’t watch. She keeps her gaze trained on Blake, holds her in her eyes rather than her arms. The knife is slowly passed around the circle - she hears Neptune’s small noise of disgust, Sun’s held-back grunt, Weiss’s squeak. And Blake’s eyes flicker to the blade, intent hidden in the lines of her mouth, her tears, her determination. Yang’s jaw tightens, understanding.

And then it’s Ruby’s turn, standing to Blake’s left. She holds the knife, turns it over in her hands, examining the ornately-carved hilt, the strange jagged nature of the blade. When she cuts skin, it’s almost methodical; a straight line, blood welling at the edges. 

But she doesn’t hand it to Blake, last of the circle. She watches Yang watch Blake, and she says calmly, “I’m not doing it.” 

“You don’t have a choice,” Yang replies, her tone just as mild. “Give it to Blake, Ruby.” 

“No,” she says, a lick of fire coming to her voice. “I won’t.” 

“Stop fighting it,” Yang says, finally turning her gaze to her sister. “We don’t have time for this.” 

And she _is_ fighting - it’s almost physical, hands curved along her spine, fingers wrapped around her elbow, a greater presence with its strings tugging at her movements. They can all see it in her, can see the effort, the futility. 

But Ruby stares her head-on and bursts out, “I love you, and there is nothing _good_ about killing someone you love!” 

Something stirs around the circle, like a collective shiver. Neptune shifts a foot; Pyrrha shakes her head and blinks. Yang swears she hears the sound of a _crack,_ a tree branch snapping, or a stone crumbling under its own weight. 

Finally, Blake speaks, taking the attention in place of her turn. “You know what’ll happen if she gives it to me,” she says, calmer than she’s been in years; her decision’s been made. “You don’t hurt the people you love. I broke that promise once. I won’t do it again.”

“You’re not supposed to love me,” she whispers, unable to argue. She’d always rationalized her own death as a necessary sacrifice, but she’d never agreed to the idea of necessary trauma. And now, in her final moments, she’s finally starting to understand her family: her father, spending days staring into the fields, so far away he may as well have been dead, too. Qrow, unable to get through an hour without a drink in his hand. Her own mother, gone. “You were never supposed to love me.”

“But we _do,_ ” Ruby says, stepping forward and breaking the circle. Her voice turns forceful, demanding; when all you have’s a hammer, suddenly everything becomes something you can shatter. “What if it were me? Could you do it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “What if it were Blake?”

“No,” Yang murmurs, winding her arms around her body; her head’s spinning, there’s a wind roaring. She imagines Ruby in the middle of the circle, imagines Blake - she’d kill herself before letting harm come to either of them, no matter what fucked-up magic she’d been forced into. Her prosthetic fingers twitch. She already almost had. “No, I couldn’t. Never.” 

“Exactly,” Ruby says, and takes another step, and another - arm extending, palm facing out. Her boots crush twigs, and they sound like bombs going off in Yang’s brain. The pressure is immense inside of her skull, like her brain is pounding against the walls of a cell. Her blood feels cold against her veins, heavy and saturated. 

She’s not the only one: Pyrrha’s fists are clenched so tightly they’ve gone white, and Sun keeps rolling his shoulders as if hands are scratching at his back, grasping for skin to cling to. And it’s so _loud -_ she can’t be the only one hearing it. Worse than static. Like she has her face pressed against an earthquake. 

“Exactly,” Ruby repeats again, softer, and her hand connects with Yang’s elbow, fingers gently closing. “And neither can I, Yang. Neither can Blake. We love you. We need you to _live._ ” 

She lifts her other hand, rubs away Yang’s tear tracks with the pad of her thumb. Yang inhales; a hurricane catches in her throat, but the words fling out in the right direction, in the right order in spite of it. “I love you, too.” She looks around the circle, from Neptune’s damp eyes to the imprint of Blake’s teeth against her bottom lip. “I love you all.” 

The stone beneath them splits open at the crack.

When all you have’s a hammer, everything becomes something you can shatter. Even a thousand year-old curse.


	4. Chapter 4

The screaming in Yang’s head turns to a roar, and there’s a light so blindingly bright she has to blink it out of her vision for several minutes, as if she’s been staring at the sun. Her sense of gravity is misaligned; the floor’s above her, she’s falling into something soft - skin melting off the bone, eyes rolling out of the sockets of her skull - maybe she’s dead after all. 

She feels around her, blind and deaf, until she hits a body. 

Oh, _god_ , she’s killed them; in her arrogance, in her disobedience, she’s been punished through the people she loves - whatever they’d released grew claws and teeth and tore them limb from limb, just as Adam promised he’d do to her all those years ago - somehow it’s worse happening to everybody else, and she finally understands why Blake ran away; if she’s alive, she’ll tell her; if they’re in hell, she’ll break out and tell her anyway - she’ll apologize and kiss her and--

Until she blinks again, and can make out shapes. Until she shakes her head, and hears her blood rushing, but hears the groaning, too. 

The body she’s touching is alive, and she recognizes the red hair.

“Ruby,” she tries to say, a disoriented mouthful. She unsteadily lifts herself onto her knees and crawls over to her, hand resting on her shoulder and shaking. “Ruby.” 

Ruby moans, turning her head; Yang dazedly glances around the clearing, finds the rest of them in similarly unstable states - blinking the light out of their eyes, hands against their temples, dragging themselves into sitting positions. 

“Pyrrha?” she hears Weiss say. “Pyrrha?” 

“I’m - I’m here.” 

“Yang? Ruby?” 

It becomes a chorus of name-calling and affirmations; Yang’s head is still splitting at the seams, too full and uncontainable. Everyone answers, one at a time; everyone except Blake. 

“Blake?” Ruby says, twisting her body and wincing. “Blake?” 

The stone is cracked cleanly in half; the leaves have started to fall from the tree, one by one. As Yang grapples with her bearings, the rest of them fall suddenly silent with muted gasps and horrified gazes. All trained on one location, directly behind her. 

It’s not like the books, or the movies; she doesn’t have time for some gut-wrenching internal monologue about regret, where she makes wishes and pleads with false gods. She snaps her head in the same direction so quickly she thinks she breaks it, and then just stares, processing with the rest of them.

Because Blake is still on her feet, pressed against the trunk of a tree, holding the tip of the knife to her stomach. 

And she’s gone _wild._ Ears flat against her head, pupils dilated, legs shaking so hard they can barely hold her weight - Blake looks not just as if she’s seen a ghost, but become one. 

Nobody seems to know how to approach her. Yang stands up, taking a couple careful steps closer; even if Blake’s possessed, or - infected, or mad - she won’t hurt Yang. But the closer Yang gets, the more she realizes it’s none of those things.

Blake is _terrified._

“It spoke,” she whispers, eyes shot and body trembling violently; the knife won’t be easy to pry from her grasp, entire fist white as bone. “I - swear, whatever the fuck - the fuck it is - it _spoke._ I heard it, I swear. I _swear._ ” 

“I believe you,” Yang says cautiously, and rests her hand over the back of Blake’s, fingers following the curves of her own. “Put the knife down, okay? You don’t need that anymore.” 

“I thought it was a trap,” Blake babbles, fear-filled tears rolling down her cheeks, her chest heaving - if they don’t get her calm, she’s in danger of hyperventilating. “I thought it was coming. I thought it was--” 

“Shh,” Yang soothes, and gently works the knife from her grip, coaxing her fist open slowly. Blake holding a knife to her own stomach on the verge of a panic attack can’t lead to any positive outcomes. “I know, baby. It’s okay. Let’s put down the knife. It’s not a trick--” she pauses and modulates; Blake’s focusing solely on her face, reading her expression, her tone, her posture “--but we should probably still get out of here.” 

And after an unbearable, agonizing minute, Blake nods, and releases the knife into Yang’s hands; she throws it a safe distance away, watching it skid against the wet leaves. It’s too empty, too loud - the clearing used to feel omniscient, oppressive, like it knew every thought you’d ever had and would set the table for a sit-down feast of the worst ones - the birdsong is off a key, the sky too light a grey. And there’s nothing here. She feels nothing.

When you’re so used to warning signs, the absence of them is what starts to seem wrong.

\--

They make it back through the forest, past the river, beyond the lake; Yang and Ruby’s house comes into view, the chimney smoking and the windows dark. Their dad must be grieving, passing a bottle back and forth with Qrow, trying and failing to find words of comfort. _Sorry about your wife, and your girlfriend, and your daughter. Sorry about your other daughter, who won’t ever be the same._

Did she even say goodbye to him? Her days have been a blur--

“What are we doing?” Neptune asks, teeth chattering in the cold. “I mean - what are we _doing?_ ” 

“Getting some answers,” Yang says, roughly prying open the back door.

Tai jerks up from where he’d been sitting on the couch with his head in his hands, crying into them; his eyes are red, and there’s a bottle of whiskey sitting on the table between him and Qrow, who’s got his own arms resting on his knees, a full glass held loosely in his fingers. It’s sickening, repulsive - walking in on someone in the middle of grieving you - but they both see her, alive and standing in front of them. There’s no time for celebration, but even if there were, this wouldn’t be it.

Qrow is the one who speaks, because Tai’s been deceived by the promise of life before and refuses to fall for it again. Fool me once, twice, three times. 

“What have you done?” he says, low and disbelieving. 

“Well,” Yang says. “Worse than you, probably.” 

He looks at each of them in turn, covered in leaves and grass and mud, dirty and disheveled - some of them trembling in fear, some of them in exhilaration - and takes a long swig of his drink.

“Well,” he echoes wryly, “guess it runs in the family.”

\-- 

Qrow paces. Blake looks like she’s on the verge of passing out, leaning heavily against Yang’s shoulder. Tai busily makes them all coffee and tea, having no other clue what to do with himself. But Weiss has taken to habits in the face of unimaginable consequence, and is meticulously brushing dirt off of her coat. 

Sun shoots her a look, an eyebrow raised. _Really?_ he’s saying. _Now? You’re doing this now?_

“It’s expensive,” she says haughtily, and some things never change. 

“I knew we should’ve sacrificed you instead,” he replies.

It is nowhere near the time or place - it’s the polar opposite of both, really - but the euphoria of breaking a curse that took and traumatized so many before them leaves nowhere to go but hysterics. And then they’re all laughing, including Weiss - albeit reluctantly - because they’re _together._ They’ve potentially unleashed an incomprehensible evil upon the world, but it hasn’t been by their own hands; they haven’t compromised their souls, haven’t committed an act so heinous they’d spend the rest of their lives throwing sheets over mirrors. And that’s as close to a victory as they’re going to get.

Here’s what they know: 

“The stone _split,_ ” Qrow repeats, ruffling his hand through the back of his hair as he speaks. “Completely in half.”

“That’s right,” Ruby says, taking the mug Tai hands her with a grateful glance.

“And there was a light--” 

“Like, extremely bright--”

“And a force. It knocked us all back--”

“It spoke,” Blake says determinedly, and the way she’s holding her tea is too reminiscent of the knife. “I don’t know what it said. But I heard it.”

“Okay, okay,” Qrow says, overwhelmed. He hadn’t prepared for this, though maybe he should’ve. “One at a time, please.” 

“Whatever was there,” Jaune says, “it isn’t now. We felt it. It was so heavy and then it was--”

“--Gone,” Pyrrha finishes for him. “It was just...gone.” 

“Great,” Qrow says, and resumes his pacing. “Fantastic. Great. So we crack the curse, and our children are punished. But you _break_ the curse, and…I don’t know. The world ends? I guess we’ll see.” He holds up his flask as if toasting the gods. “Cheers.”

Are their ears still sensitive, or does the wind howl a little louder? “What do you mean, you cracked it?” Yang asks, and her arm tightens around Blake’s waist. 

“You must’ve seen it,” he dismisses. “Did any of you bleed? On the stone?” 

They all look down at their palms, but those of them with cuts only find a thread of shiny pink skin, strangely half-healed in such a short amount of time. 

“No,” Weiss says, as if it only dawns on her just then. “We didn’t get that far.”

He raises an eyebrow, like he’s impressed. “Wow,” he says, and lets out an ugly, self-deprecating laugh. “The rules _really_ didn’t make an impression on you kids at all, did they?” 

There’s a secret they’re not being told, and Yang finally starts to wonder if it’s important.

She’d never asked before because it’d felt callous to. With Raven, it’d been a dig, an anger, a blame, a release. She’d never seen Raven after that night, and had never put a face to her torture. Not like Qrow, married to his bottle, who did his best when their father couldn’t. 

It would’ve been heartless to make him speak of their mother’s death like a folktale, a story rather than a torment. 

“What happened the night of the original ritual?” Yang asks delicately. “When Summer didn’t die?” 

It takes her until then to notice Tai is no longer in the room. 

Qrow’s gaze flickers from hers to Ruby’s, as if expecting resistance. An excuse for him to refrain, citing unkindness and unnecessity. He doesn’t find it - all he’s met with is a cold resolve, and a piercing, demanding stare.

Yes. Time he stopped keeping Summer’s death to himself.

“We...started going through the motions,” Qrow recalls flatly, staring down at his bottle instead of them. “Cuts across the palm, blood on the stone in offering. But we - we couldn’t do _more._ You’d barely been born, Ruby. Weeks old. And it seemed so - so...disgustingly, unnecessarily cruel. We couldn’t do it.” He pauses, gives his head a little jerk. “It’s like...waking up from a fog, you know? You must’ve experienced it today. Your head’s so full and so empty, but something’s propelling you forward - or trying to.

“That was it, at first,” he continues. “We couldn’t say the words. We...we’d broken the rules, too, in our time - not as badly as you kids, but we knew each other. And we all knew Summer. We wanted her to live.” 

None of them have heard this before, not really; with half of their parents dead or missing, their resources for the truth fell few and far between, and those that knew weren’t exactly keen on discussing details. 

“So you went home,” Ruby says. Blank and emotionless. It hurts, but not the way she expects it to; like hearing an anecdote of a person before you knew them. They weren’t _yours,_ then,and it compartmentalizes, gets filed away under _references._

“It was difficult,” Qrow says. “But Summer said...she could hear the baby crying. And it was stronger.” 

Are their eyes playing tricks on them, or do the lights flicker? “Okay,” Yang says. “And the stone cracked.” 

“Right.” 

“But if you got _away,_ ” Weiss says, and here, the part she’s never understood - the idea of _going back._ “What made you return?” 

Now Qrow is the one in the nightmare. Forest instead of a tongue. Blackness beneath. “You,” he says, and takes the entire bottle, sidelining his empty glass. “You all were marked. The same night, two years later.” He swallows a mouthful that even has Sun wincing. “And none of us prepared for that.”

“Qrow,” Ruby says, and only the plea from her could even manage to shake the memory loose enough to pour. “What happened that night?” 

\--

(Something is with them in the woods that night.

It’s nearing midnight when they arrive at the ritual site, yelling and arguing and accusing each other of murder. Now it isn’t just them, they say. Now it’s their children, and they’ll have to watch them die. It’s someone’s fault. It has to be _someone’s_ fault. 

In the darkness, the tree looks as if it’s bleeding. The crack in the stone is full of hands and mouths, waiting for prey to drag down and swallow whole. Qrow can only look on, the only one of them without a true stake. His nieces, yes, but he hasn’t been driven to madness in the same way. Not like Ghira, or Willow, or Jade - whose little boy, Sun, had just started kindergarten - and nowhere near Raven.

Something is with Raven in the woods that night. 

She goes feral and broken. She’s being watched. Red slits gleaming out of the darkness and a shadow with too many arms. She says she dreams of the future, where grotesque monsters devour their children alive and their town becomes a burial ground, overtaken by the same corpse flowers growing on their wrists. 

Qrow has never seen her so unhinged; it’s terrifying to the point that they’re all more scared of her than what led them there in the first place, and take turns talking to her in a low voice as if she were a trapped animal, backed into a corner. Snarling with her teeth, snapping at their hands. Her eyes aren’t her own and her head tilts at unnatural angles when she speaks. 

They don’t think she’s _dangerous_ ; she’s afraid for her daughter's life and lashing out, just as they’d all been moments before. 

They don’t think she’s dangerous, right up until the moment she grabs the knife.

“You,” she growls at Summer, and takes a threatening step towards her; the rest of them make various noises of shocked protest. “You should’ve died when you were supposed to!”

“I know,” Summer says calmly, and she’s already standing on the stone. It’s not her fault, and they’re all aware of it, but she won’t let whatever force holding Raven’s soul twist her own. 

That’s why she doesn’t fight back. She knows what Qrow knows - and perhaps even more.

“Qrow,” Ghira hisses, holding out his arms and shifting on his feet, on the attack. He’s big; he could subdue her with the element of surprise, but she’s fast. It’s not a safe bet. “Stop her! She’s your sister!” 

_She’s not_ , is what Qrow can’t tell him, can’t even begin to explain. _She’s not my sister. I don’t know_ what _she is._

“If we kill you now,” Raven says, utterly deranged and on the brink of collapse, “we’ll be saved.” 

“Raven!” Ghira barks, but she doesn’t budge an inch. Her pupils are so wide they’re swallowing her irises. The hollow tree warps its bark to laugh at them, shaking its leaves free; the fog encases them like a dome, where nobody else can hear them scream.

Something is inside of Raven in the woods that night, and it drives the knife straight through Summer’s heart.)

\--

Nobody speaks. Nobody can.

Raven’s visions - they’re too familiar to Yang. The eyes, glowing from the darkness; the shadows, clawing up the walls - her reflection, splitting open her jaw and growing too many teeth, stretching and tearing in an attempt to create more space, make her the monster--

There’s a pressure on her hand, and she looks down, finds Blake’s fingers curling around and squeezing. Yang doesn’t know what she’s seen - if she’s seen anything at all - but she recognizes the hum of terror, the tremor that comes with perceiving un-reality. 

That’s one thing Yang does know. Post-traumatic stress. Nobody truly gets away from death unscathed. 

“I think,” Qrow says after two minutes of silence, “you should all try and get some sleep.” 

“That’s it?” Sun says, loaded with incredulity. “We’re like, gonna destroy the world and you’re like, ‘okay, goodnight!’” 

“I don’t have answers,” Qrow replies roughly. “All I know is the same legend that’s been passed on to you, because that’s all anybody knows! It’s been like this for _generations._ I don’t know what will happen! It’s never happened!” 

The lamp flares, and the bulb shatters underneath its shade; a couple of them jump, and Weiss squeaks, clutching onto Pyrrha’s arm. Another second, and the power goes out entirely.

“Okay,” Neptune says nervously. “Trying not to take that as a sign.” 

Jaune lifts a trembling arm, and points out the window behind them. “What about that?” he whispers, as they all slowly turn to look.

Are they hallucinating, or is there something massive crouching out in the fields?

\--

“What the fuck,” Sun says repeatedly, white-knuckling the windowsil. “What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck--” 

Half of them have ducked below the window, peering out or hiding from sight. Even Weiss, who’d prioritized cleaning her coat after apparently releasing evil incarnate, feels more comfortable hiding in dark and dust. Ruby’s back is against the kitchen island, she’s clutching the edge in horror; Yang’s pulled Blake towards the living-room doorway, arms encircling her. Tight enough to protect, but loose enough to let her run and trusting her not to.

“Oh, we’re gonna die,” Neptune says, hiding his face against Sun’s back. “We’re gonna die. What is that, what _is that--_ ” 

“ _Quiet,_ ” Qrow hushes them, staring out at the figure. 

It’s cracking eight feet, and its black body leaves it indistinguishable; there’s no obvious markers of haunches or paws, no way to tell the length of the snout or height of the ears. They’re familiar with bears and wolves, and whatever this is - huge, body broiling in black smoke, eyes slits of red above. It only sits there, gazing in their direction, unmoving and still.

“What’s it doing?” Neptune whispers, who still hasn’t looked, though the anxiety of not knowing seems to be hitting him equally as hard. “Is it still there?” 

Red, glowing eyes - flares in the darkness, pinpricks on a map, flowers mark the spot--

It’s looking at _her._

Maybe she won’t get out of this alive, after all. 

“It’s a sign,” she says coldly, and Blake whimpers against her chest. The shadows of the room seem to encompass her, responding to her desperate desire for escape. She wants to pull Yang through, spirit them both away to where it’s safe. A void. Another earth. “That’s all it is. A sign.” 

“A sign of what?” Pyrrha asks, an arm around Weiss’s shoulders.

And without breaking its gaze, one inch at a time, the creature sinks slowly back into the grass.

“Of what’s to come.”

The overhead lights surge on, and they’re left looking at each other in the aftermath, wordless - expressions split between horrified, bewildered, astonished - if that’s the warning, they can’t even imagine the invasion.

But not Ruby. No one in her arms, searching for comfort and explanation. The people she loves are all in front of her, and the only thing she’s prepared to do is protect them.

There it is again, that determination: Summer is alive, it hits Yang suddenly. Summer is alive because her story has been told. Summer is alive tonight, and standing in the room with them.

\--

An apocalypse, or an echo of one, rising from the brink of extinction. A monster from a myth. A blessing for the world, but a curse to those it shackled, broken. 

There’s nothing else to do but retreat to their rooms, hide under the covers. Tell each other that love is there, and always has been. 

“Do you think you would’ve done it?” Weiss finally voices the fear she’s had since their failed ritual, haunted by light and crumbling obsidian. She’s picking at a thread of the blanket, leaning against Pyrrha’s shoulder. It’s easier not to look at her. “Do you think you could’ve killed Yang?” 

The silence is punctuated only by crickets outside and the gentle tinkling of wind chimes. Pyrrha’s house is farther in town, cozier, and the familiarity allows the illusion of security. Not like Weiss’s family’s mansion - all those windows, she thinks. Those long, empty corridors and deserted rooms, like it’s daring her to die there.

Pyrrha continues stroking her fingers up and down Weiss’s arm, contemplative, a grounding action to give her distance while also granting a closer look. She finally responds, “I don’t know,” and sighs. “I want to believe I wouldn’t have. I want to believe I’d have done what Ruby did.” 

“Yes,” Weiss says. “I’d like to believe that of myself, as well.” 

“Honestly,” Pyrrha admits, “I think it was doomed from the start.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Even if Ruby hadn’t broken us all out of it,” she says quietly, “I think Blake...would’ve killed herself. Or tried, at the very least. You saw her.”

Weiss doesn’t need to see her expression to find the truth in it. She remembers Blake, tears rolling down her face, broken determinism to her. Fingers aching around the knife.

\--

Back in Yang’s bedroom. Back at sixteen and barely alive. Back before broken promises and kept ones.

“I know what you were going to do today, at the ritual,” Yang murmurs, shutting the door and staying there, hand on the knob. Her face is tilted down and away, hair blocking Blake’s view of her - and then she turns, expression open and vulnerable and devastating. “You’re an idiot.” 

“I know,” Blake whispers, bottom lip trembling, arms wrapped around herself. She watches Yang approach slowly, her guard crumbling like cliffs into the sea. But then, that’s always how it’s been with Yang. “It was all I had.” 

“You had me.” 

“Not if you’re dead.” 

“How is it any better if _you_ are?!” Yang fires back, and for a split second, her eyes are a vivid red in the light, but Blake blinks and it’s gone. “Fucking - what, if you kill _yourself_ maybe the forces of evil will be like, ‘oh, cool, nevermind, we’ll take it’!? What were you _thinking_?!” 

“What would you have done?!” Blake finally snaps, rising into agitation as if the day is finally catching up with her. They face each other head-on, bodies positioned as if for a fight. Against what, they aren’t sure. The string lights darken but Yang burns. “If it had been me, Yang - what would you have done?! Killed me yourself?!” 

_No_. The accusation forces her to stumble, like she’s halted herself mid-sprint, kicking up dirt and rocks with the threat of pavement and broken skin below. No, of course not - she remembers her own thoughts from earlier, standing on the stone and staring at the faces of the people she loves. Remembers thinking about how she’d rather end it all than hurt a single one of them.

“No,” she admits angrily at last, but has the decency to look away, ashamed. Her voice is coarse and full of grit. She’s finally alive: she won’t start out as a liar or a hypocrite. “No. I’m sorry.” 

There’s so much more to say than that, but it’s as good a place to begin as any. Blake’s rigid posture crumbles slightly, just as castles do with time, and ruin is never as beautiful as history pretends it is.

“It’s okay,” Blake says, softer than Yang had managed. Her oversized sweater leaves the sleeves curled up in her fists, arms crossed, a habit of uncertainty she’d never quite lost from when she was a child. “I just - I can’t - I can’t _do_ this without you.” 

“Do what?”

“ _Exist._ ” She utters the word exhaustedly, raising and dropping her shoulders. Yang gathers up the grace to meet her eyes again, traces the circles underneath them, five years’ worth of sleepless nights. “Come on, Yang. You being away from me was one thing, but you not being anywhere--” she breaks off, rebelling against the nightmare now that they’ve awoken from it. “It isn’t right. It isn’t _fair._ ” 

“Fine,” Yang says, and works on her own frustration, masking grief in her chest. “But you dying wouldn’t have been fair to me either, Blake.”

She’s so small standing there, ears flicking and hair a wreck, trembling from exhaustion. There’s still a leaf stuck to the side of her sweater, red and disarming. Like a child who’d spent the day lost in the woods, and finally found their way back.

“You were going to break your promise,” Blake whispers, gaze trained on the floor. “You promised.” 

Yang thinks of all the ways she’d have responded to that remark before today. _You_ left _me,_ remember? I had no promise to keep. A promise is a gift, not a contract. A promise can be revoked if I’m hurt enough. 

But she’s not that person anymore. She’s free. 

“You’re right,” she says softly, and steps closer to her. Fingers reaching out to touch her cheek. “You’re right.” 

Blake leans into the touch, tilts her head until her breath is ghosting Yang’s thumb, and it’s enough. 

Yang kisses her.

They’re alone in her head, for the first time in years; there’s no jagged teeth at the bottom of her skull, no pressure building in her veins until they burst; no smoke, no fog, no water. It’s strange, having nothing to drown in other than the heat of Blake’s mouth against hers. 

She slips her fingers underneath the hem of Blake’s sweater, pulls it up and over her head; Blake does the same to hers. They build a monument of clothes on her floor, each layer a brick. All the days lost and wasted; all the hurt that took hold. Gone, now, no matter what’s to come.

She pushes Blake back against the bed, takes in the shade of her skin underneath the glow of the lights, how her chest moves when she breathes, how her toes curl in anticipation. 

Because Blake can tell, too. Yang is free, and she’s _different._

She encompasses herself in senses. She trusts what she can see, what she can feel, what she can taste - tongue flat against Blake’s cunt, her hands locked around Blake’s wrists and pinning them down - how she cries out and gasps and moans, struggling against Yang’s grip. Two fingers, three fingers, Blake on her stomach, grasping at the sheets. How beautiful she looks on the edge, and how stunning she becomes when she crashes over it. 

I love you, Yang says, and Blake’s eyes snap open, her fingers pulling sharply on Yang’s hair. 

Again, Blake says, and works a knee between her thighs. 

I love you, Yang pants, giving in. I love you. 

Yang is free, and whatever thought she shouldn’t be will come to regret it.

\--

Despite this, the first one of them to observe the impact of the incomplete ritual is not, surprisingly, Yang. 

It’s Pyrrha. 

She doesn’t sleep well the night before, or at all, really; Weiss curls up in her arms and she’s so _small_ in spite of her defiance, her posture, her heart - the weight of protection sinks automatically into Pyrrha’s shoulders. They’ve interrupted something sacred, and she isn’t naive enough to believe they’ll go unpunished for it. If the legends are to be believed - if the sound of stone cracking signals release - the world will. In time. How long, she isn’t sure.

That, she feels, is her duty. It didn’t start when she got the bud on her wrist, marking her for sacrifice. No, no - it started the minute the stone split, and the world gained a force it shouldn’t have had. And it’s her job to stand in its way.

“Pyrrha?” Weiss says, sounding utterly perplexed and staring at her hands. “What are - what are you _doing?_ ” 

She glances down at the spoon she’d pulled out to stir cream into her coffee, and finds that somehow, she’s tied it into a knot.

A spoon. Metal. Which she could definitely _bend_ if she tried, but - this--

“I - don’t know,” she says, turning it over between her fingers, dumbfounded. “I was - I wasn’t paying attention.” 

Weiss, who is nothing if not pragmatic, simply grabs another spoon out of the drawer and hands it to her. There’s a problem she can solve, unlike every single event that occurred yesterday. 

But Pyrrha takes it gingerly. “Um,” she says. “You want me to - try bending it?” 

They’ve never been this confused by the other in their lives, and that includes the first time they ever spoke, breaking a thousand years’ worth of tradition. “What?” Weiss says, giving her an odd look. “No, I’d rather like to keep your silverware. It’s for your coffee.” 

“Oh.” Yes, that does makes more sense.

“Although,” she continues, and crosses her arms, glancing at the unusable wreckage Pyrrha's made of the first one, “I _am_...slightly curious.” 

Pyrrha grins, nowhere to go but humor. “Obviously I’ve become telekinetic.” 

“We’ll be selling out theatres in no time,” Weiss plays along, but nods her head. “Give it a try.” 

It’s just a spoon, and she doesn’t honestly expect anything to happen. Clearly it’s old, or her mother’d been sold silverware made of a cheaper material than advertised, if a bit of distraction wound itself into _that._ And so she takes the spoon--

“Wait!” Weiss cries, and reaches back into the drawer, pulling out a fork. “Here. Use this.” Under Pyrrha’s exasperated gaze, she says, “I know it isn’t mine, but nobody wants an uneven set of cutlery.”

That’s a classic remark that warrants an eye-roll; Pyrrha loves her, but her mannerisms are incredibly predictable. She takes the fork, swapping it out, and it’s all nonsense to her, anyway; she holds it between both hands, intending to make a show of it, except--

Except she _feels_ it, then. As if she were holding clay. 

Her brain knows it’s metal, and so do her eyes, but her fingers don’t seem to care. It’s pliable, as if it’s been heated and she’s now molding it. She bends each point back curiously, fascinated by the lack of resistance, and straights them again; and then, like a ring, she twists it around her finger, a spiraling loop. 

There’s no logic or reason or explanation; there’s the curse, but she can’t even begin to understand how the two events are connected. A seismic shift? Obsidian dust? _Magic_?

It’s ridiculous and nonsensical. All she can do is look to Weiss and feebly joke, “Should I do a knife next?”

Until she catches sight of it, poking out from underneath her sleeve.

When you’ve seen something for the last twenty-three years of your life, you don’t expect it to change. Your brain just fills in the information after awhile, because it’s lazy, and what’s the point in expending energy to process what’s factual and contained--

And that’s why, when she pushes up her sleeve and stares at her wrist, her brain can’t comprehend what she’s seeing. Deeper than denial. The information - stored in a stale, dusty corner of her mind, where the file’s one page long and marked in red with _verified_ \- needs to be entirely de-worded and rewritten. 

Because the mark on her wrist is no longer the bud of a flower. 

She rubs at it with her thumb, like ink she expects to smear; like she’ll blink and it’ll be that same jagged circle again, petals tied in tight and stem cut at the top. 

Instead, with pink-tinged skin and black outline as sharp as ever, in its place is what looks like a spear, crossed over the shape of a shield.

\--

There are two unexpected visitors to Neptune’s door that day. 

His house is most central in town, and for whatever reason, it strikes them as the safest; not as many trees to hide in, no fields to grow out of. Whatever’s watching them has to get through his gate, and though it’s flimsy and weak, it’s more than they’d have anywhere else - even Weiss’s. 

Too much space, she’d said when they’d asked. The garden’s so dark. I swear the ivy grows the second you aren’t looking at it. 

There are five other people in Neptune’s home by ten a.m., feeling like they’d never slept at all. And at exactly ten thirty-four, it becomes six. 

The ringing startles all of them from their silence; they’ve been stuck on the question ‘what now’ for an hour, running in circles, chasing their tails, gnawing off their own limbs in lieu of a sign. 

It’s coming from Neptune’s scroll, alerting him to a visitor at the gate. He glances around, starts to count - several of them are doing the same thing, wondering who’s missing who also doesn’t have a key, as Weiss does - but ultimately comes up empty, and just presses _answer_. 

“Hello?” he says, and listens. 

“ _I’m looking for Blake Belladonna,_ ” the voice responds hurriedly, grunting like they’re shifting a weight. “ _Is she here? Please,_ please _say yes._ ” 

“Uh,” Neptune says, gesturing bewilderedly between Blake and the speaker, “can you hold on a second?” and doesn’t wait for a response before muting himself. “Blake, do you recognize - whoever that is?” 

Ilia, her frantic voicemail, her promise of a flight; she’d entirely pushed it out of her memory. “Oh, fuck,” she says, and presses her knuckles to her forehead. “Yes. Let her in.” 

He presses the button again. “Okay, I’ll - um - let you in? I’m the--”

“ _Number six. Yeah, I know. Thanks._ ” 

All heads shift to Blake in turn; they’d made friends over the years, sure, but none that made it home with them. Yang raises her eyebrows, looks low and whistles. 

“Another woman, huh?” she says, and jokingly begins to remove her arm from around Blake’s shoulders. “What does she have that I don’t?” 

“Don’t,” Blake breathes out, dreading the knock at the door. “Don’t make jokes about - she - I had to let her down. So. Don’t.” 

That’s not something any of them expect to hear, but they’d never known Blake without Yang; to them, their break-up had been a brief interval of error, a calculated mistake that would rectify itself under the light of day. They’d never thought about all that time apart, all those people with the desire to fill that empty space.

Yang, though - she’d thought about it many times. 

She’d met people who wanted her after Blake. People who dazzled with their flattery, with their money, with their sex appeal. And rejection after rejection, she’d wonder if Blake were doing the same thing, or if she were so lonely she’d let them in. 

Neptune’s already waiting to open the door when she knocks. 

“Oh,” Ilia says, in the flesh at five-foot five, heavy winter coat over her black sweats and long-sleeved shirt. Her auburn hair is up in a ponytail, hurriedly smoothed away from her face and sticking up at odd angles. She stares straight past Neptune, hones in on Blake and the woman with an arm around her shoulders, and says something none of them expect: “Oh, thank _god._ ” 

She shoves her way into the hallway, ignoring him completely; Blake thinks her suitcase wheel runs over one of his feet and he winces. “Hi,” she says, nervously getting to her feet and taking Yang’s hand with her. “Sorry I didn’t answer your message - we’ve, um, been kind of--”

“--Busy, yeah, got that,” Ilia brushes away impatiently, and quickly flits her gaze around the room. She’s counting, too. “You - you didn’t - right? You didn’t.” Her stare steadies on Yang, though not in a jealous way; it’s a little more curious, a little more admiring. 

“No,” Blake says quietly, and squeezes Yang’s fingers. “We didn’t.” 

“Great,” Ilia says, unzipping her coat; her winter glovers find their way across Neptune’s kitchen counter, while her suitcase rests against the wall. He can’t seem to decide what to tackle first as Ilia disrupts his space and triggers his excessive need for organization - her coat finds a barstool instead of a hook; her scroll actually drops and hits the floor - but she’s concerned by none of it, only stepping into middle of the room with an air of importance. “Because I’m pretty sure everything you’ve ever been told is a lie.” 

It’s one way to make an entrance.

\--

She’s piling documents onto his coffee table, and she’s getting everywhere. 

“What do you _mean,_ a _lie?”_ Blake repeats, still soaking up the accusation. “Like, which part?” 

“ _Like_ , all of it,” Ilia mimics, and slams open her notebook with a flourish. She bites the tip of her pen between her lips, glances to her notes, and points to each of them in turn. “Vasilias,” she says, scribbles a checkmark. “Wukong. Rose. Arc.” She pauses. “Xiao Long.” 

“Present,” Yang says, and raises her prosthetic arm.

“Wait,” Ilia says. “Where are--”

It’s _almost_ on cue; she actually trails off for a moment, looking back to her notes, and Weiss busts through the door right in that spare second it takes Ilia to regain her bearings.

But _she_ isn’t alone, either, and it’s not just Pyrrha trailing behind her. 

“Weiss--” Yang starts, eyeing the small form.

“ _Schnee,_ ” Ilia exclaims, and scribbles in her notebook. 

“--did you kidnap a child?” 

“Yes, Yang,” Weiss says, throwing up her hands dramatically; wow, a single comment to set her off, that’s a new record. “You’re _so_ clever. Yes, Pyrrha and I were so _devastated_ by my _barren womb_ that we lured a young boy into a van with promises of playing _Head-Puncher 6,_ or whatever the fuck game is popular these days.” She’s clearly had a hell of a morning, and been given the perfect opportunity for a stage. To the boy’s credit, he looks absolutely terrified of her. “After all, nothing says ‘I’m not unhinged from the act of releasing a great evil into the world’ like kidnapping teenagers!” 

She’s essentially won the conversation by leaving them with nothing to reply to, until Yang starts applauding. 

“That’s the best slam poem I’ve ever heard,” she says, and Blake elbows her in the ribs. 

“I’m twenty-two,” is all Oscar says, face screwed up in confusion.

“Sorry,” Pyrrha chimes in. “We had...um...it’s been a weird day. Already.” 

“Join the club,” says Sun. “Apparently everything we’ve ever been told is a lie, according to Blake’s former flame.” 

“Excuse me,” Ilia says, scandalized. 

“ _Sorry,_ ” Sun clarifies genuinely. “ _Ex-_ former flame.” 

“That’s not--” she blinks. “Hang on--” 

“Enough!” Ruby snaps, boots hitting the floor, and they’re all so stunned by her tone that it works; Oscar, whoever he is, is probably regretting his entire existence. She glares at them, jaw set, eyes hard, and then relaxes with a grin. “I don’t have anything to say. I just wanted to try that.” 

“Can - um - can I try?” the boy squeaks, half-hiding behind Weiss’s thin frame. 

“Of course, Oxen,” Sun says diplomatically. 

“It’s Oscar.” 

“I think breaking the curse took all of his remaining brain cells with it,” Yang offers, and he leans over Blake to punch her in the shoulder. 

“Well,” Oscar starts, working up the courage to simply talk over them, “I think I’m possessed.” He lets the statement sink in. “By whatever you released from the tomb.” 

“Also,” Weiss says boredly, “Pyrrha’s mark is gone - it’s like a spear now - and she can control metal.” 

“This is a lot of information to absorb in sixty seconds,” Neptune says.

\--

They let Oscar speak first, due to the ‘possession’. It seems most pressing, Pyrrha argues gracefully on his behalf; plus, Neptune adds, he’s like sixteen, and probably has a bedtime. 

He takes Yang’s spot at the kitchen table, hands tucked in his lap and staring at the grain of the wood. Blake’s back is pressed against her chest, and one of Yang’s arms settles casually around her waist. Ilia stares, but pretends like she’s not. Well, there are more important matters to attend to. 

It’s only two in the afternoon, but the sky’s grown unnaturally dark outside, and rain threatens the windows.

“I...keep going into this _trance,_ ” he whispers, glancing behind him like something’s there, watching. “I don’t know what else to call it. It’s scaring me. But I keep - it’s like someone’s - in my _head._ Not like they’re talking to me, but like...I feel what it feels.”

Before this, Yang’s first thought would be to tell the kid to see a doctor. But considering their families have been feeding their children to some otherworldly energy for years, well - maybe they aren’t the only ones experiencing the after-effects of that. 

Ilia’s already taking notes. Yang attempts interest instead of dismissiveness. “And what is it feeling?” 

He pauses, shifts in his chair. One of his heels taps incessantly against the wooden leg. “Um,” he says; _inarticulate ghost,_ Yang thinks. “It’s like…‘thank you’,” he interprets slowly.

“‘Evil’ is thanking us?” Ruby repeats, and she’s always one to give the benefit of the doubt, but even this is a little far-fetched for her. 

“It’s - it’s hard to...I don’t understand what any of it _means_ ,” he enunciates, and fidgets uncomfortably. “But I don’t feel like - wait, what do you mean, ‘evil’?” He pauses, glancing between them. “Is that what you thought you were doing?” 

Weiss coolly raises an eyebrow; he instinctively shrinks beneath it. “What do _you_ mean, ‘thought’?” 

“I - I don’t know,” he says, pitch rising with every word. “Just that - I can only tell you what I feel, okay? And it’s not - it’s not _bad._ I swear. It’s like...like music. Or a sunrise. Or a second chance.”

Thunder rumbles above them; somewhere over the forest, lightning strikes. Jaune is lighting candles in case the power goes out again. The scratching of Ilia’s pencil against her notebook is the only quiet interruption, transcribing an impossible message. 

“Why should we believe you?” Neptune finally asks, knowing they don’t have much else to go off of. 

Again and closer, thunder; rattling the windows, the walls, the doors. Not like a demand for entry, Yang thinks, but a plea.

“C’mon,” Oscar whispers urgently, leaning in. “Don’t you _feel_ that?” 

She’s not sure if she does; the things she’s _felt,_ the past twenty-four hours alone; the things she’s seen, or at least convinced herself she did. 

It’s not a trust in him she lacks. It’s that she’s afraid to believe something wants her alive, after all the torture she endured believing that nothing did. That regardless of who loved her, what didn’t was greater. It’s hard to overcome your own self-destructive nature when destruction’s what you’ve been bred to do.

But it’s Pyrrha who speaks first, palm pressed against the glass.

“Something’s out there,” she murmurs, her troubled reflection an echo of her voice. “Something different than the creature we saw yesterday. And it needs help.” 

Dust shimmers. If there’s a storm, it’s between them. Eight people who broke a curse and two people who have no business even knowing of it. Too many answers and not enough questions. A possession and a power. 

“Pyrrha,” Weiss says lowly. “Show them.” 

She turns, red ponytail swinging behind her, and a part of her has metamorphosed. In her eyes sleeps an ancient beast, waiting to crack her spine and grow its wings. When cut open, she’s only rings. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. 

She lifts her hand, fingers stretched and wide, palm offering itself for a kiss.

And a knife comes shooting out of Neptune’s kitchen, sharp point headed directly for it.

Blake actually screams; Ruby topples off her chair and onto the floor. Jaune throws himself against the wall, arms up and blocking his face. Whether he’s protecting himself from the gore or from the knife isn’t clear - not that there’s any need to worry about either of those things, but that only becomes clear in the moment that follows.

Weiss, right beside her and watching with an eerily blank expression on her face, is the only one who hadn’t jumped in some way.

The tip of the knife is pressed against the middle of Pyrrha’s palm, hovering there and rotating slowly in the air.

It hasn’t even pierced the skin. She lets them absorb the act - like a magic trick, an illusionist; _make us all disappear,_ Yang thinks of requesting next - and then she wraps her fingers around the blade, like she’s clutching it as tightly as she can.

She doesn’t bleed. Not a drop. 

And when she releases it, all it bears is the impression of her grip.

“Like we said,” Weiss repeats, prying the knife out of thin air and twirling it slowly between her fingers. “We’ve had a weird day.”

\--

“Okay. Okay.” Sun looks like Qrow the night before, wearing down a path across the floor. In fifty years, new tenants follow footprints and say, _something strange happened here._ They find a bent knife under a floorboard. There’s been a murder. Okay, her mind is getting away from her. “So everything we know is a lie. Great. Next?”

“But that doesn’t make _sense_!” Jaune groans, furiously rubbing at his head. “What _for?_ ”

“I’ve _always_ said this wasn’t right!” Ruby claims hotly. “Why would something _good_ require something so - so--”

“--Barbaric?” Weiss finishes for her.

“So why isn’t the world _worse?_ ” Neptune says. “If whatever was in there wasn’t _evil_ to begin with, and it’s been out _here_ the whole time…”

“I think I have an idea,” Ilia says, scanning her notes. “Look - you’ve all been involved in a family curse that had one of you, every fifty years, die in a ritual sacrifice. It’s not your fault. It’s a fucking cult.” She shakes her head, and her bluntness demands a certain kind of attention and respect. “Sun - the world _sucks._ Sure, there’s no ongoing, magical war destroying the planet, but is that really the benchmark here? People are dying _every day._ We’re still in _human_ wars. Governments are corrupt. Entire cities are on the borderline of poverty. It’s either too hot or too cold, and ‘natural’ disasters seem to be growing exponentially by the year. Is it really so hard to believe that - just _maybe_ \- the lie you’ve been told is that _darkness_ is what you were protecting the world from?” 

Her words ring out in the silence with an energy that almost reverberates. It’s too much to wrap their heads around, but they have to do it anyway. It’s been too much their whole lives. Jaune says, “Are you trying to tell us that we’ve been killing ourselves to - what, like, lock up whatever power can make things actually _good_?” 

“In exchange for your families’ continued success,” Ilia says. “I did some research on all of your families, back when I was still trying to get the story for an expose.”

“Did you Google us?” Ruby asks, looking over her shoulder. “Because I tried that. There’s nothing. It’s pretty annoying.”

Ilia carries on like she hadn’t heard the interruption. “Weiss - your father _alone_ should’ve bankrupted your company twenty times over. He’s been miraculously bailed out every time. Ruby - did you know the land you and Yang grew up on is actually in your name? It didn’t go to your father; it went directly to you. And the reason this town has remained largely unchanged and unexpanded since its inception is because you _own_ it all. The next town over - Miere - hasn’t ever expanded in this direction, even though they’ve tried to, because your land is, somehow, _impossible_ to purchase.” She takes in a breath. “Neptune - this is an urban legend I unearthed, but with what I’ve learned, I think it’s true - your family’s library, the largest in the world, was once set ablaze, and not a single book burned. The shelves crumbled; walls fell, and the books remained in perfect condition.

So to answer your question, Ruby,” Ilia finishes, “yes, I _did_ Google you. I did a lot more than that. I read through archives, newspapers, the entire _history_ of your town. And you’re right. There is absolutely nothing about your curse.”

But she ends the statement expectantly, like she’s waiting for one of them to catch up and count the clues. Smarter than they think they are, held at gunpoint of a truth with worse implications than the lie. 

“Your families’ legend,” Ilia repeats again, her eyes burrowing into Blake’s, “has never, in all its years of existence, been written down. Not in any way, shape, or form.” It isn’t quite pity, but it’s close. “You’re a Classics major, Blake. Why doesn’t your legend _exist_?” 

The realization dawns like a car crash on a flat road. Something she would’ve seen coming if she’d had the lights on. Something so stupidly obvious she could only have been staring at the sun to miss it. 

“Because,” Blake says furiously, “whoever created it didn’t want there to be evidence of how it changed. Of what it changed _from._ ” 

Head spinning on a carousel. Circus music in her ears. Something is laughing at them out in the fog, and Blake is going to find out what.


	5. Chapter 5

Yang follows her into the rain, hood flipped over her hair - Pyrrha bending knives, Oscar with a god; a legend so meticulously erased that it could never have been real in the first place. When every which way is down, there’s no direction to go but deeper. 

Blake swears Adam is standing on the far street corner, watching her. 

“I can’t,” Blake says, shivering in the cold, in the wet, in the descent. Her fingers find Yang’s jacket and clutch at the corners. They're both used to that particular demon, and she doesn’t bother giving it a name. “I want to know. I want to _know_ what I almost lost you to.” 

None of it's hard for Yang to believe; that's what she doesn't say. They're on opposites sides of a prison cell - twenty keys but no locks. Death row, unscheduled. Blake, reconciling with a love she'd forced herself to lose, and for all the wrong reasons. And Yang, who'd started to believe so intimately in death she'd almost embraced it. 

She thought she'd been freed. Her head soundless, her heart her own. 

But she's being followed. 

The creature from the night before, sitting under the stoplight. Head tilting, tongue lolling. Watching her. 

A car drives straight through it without even disturbing the smoke, and that's how Yang knows that whatever she'd shoved out of her soul the moment the curse broke doesn't intend to let her leave without it.

It's only real to her, and it wants back in. A knocking on her skull. The sound of drums.

And Yang’s scroll rings. 

If it were anyone but Qrow, she wouldn’t have answered. The only six other people she speaks to are in the house they’ve just left, and are too busy processing their own breaking revelations to usher in more.

If it were anyone but Qrow, she wouldn’t have answered. But it is and she does.

“Qrow?” 

“ _Somebody_ _saw a wolf at the edge of town,_ ” is the first thing he says. _“Near the old farm off of Oxley.”_

“So?” Yang says.

 _“I don’t think it was a wolf.”_ A beat. “ _Stay safe out there, kiddo._ ”

She hangs up, muscle ticking in her jaw. 

“Yeah,” she says, and takes Blake’s hand, car keys jingling in her other. “You know what? So do I.”

\--

No one knows how long the farm’s been there. Decades, at least, paint faded and wood cracked, roof collapsed, and the forest with a threat to overtake it all - if the fog doesn’t get there first.

This is an extraordinarily stupid idea, Blake knows, boots sloshing in the muck left by the rain. Maybe death has made them brave. Maybe the truth has made them reckless. Maybe they’re so tired of being lost in their own lives they’re willing to risk them outright, if only for an answer.

Blake wants to _see_ it. That’s all. She wants its image clear, not a monstrosity she constructs out of fear and imagination. She wants to know how tall it is, how it walks and runs. How many teeth, and how many claws. If it’s real, or just another ghost to haunt them. 

She thinks of Raven in Qrow’s story, mad and raving. Blake wants to see what was inside of her. 

The fog is thicker the farther onto the property they move; the stables look like a skeleton, rising out of the dirt. And as they walk, she notices them: tiny buds of bindweed, exactly like the mark on their wrists. Everywhere.

It’d just been another part of the legend, she realizes. A symbolic component, cementing poetry and beauty in sacrifice. Lichens may grow on gravestones, but they grow on trees, too. 

“We were wrong,” Blake says shortly, staring at her wrist, at the buds poking through the mud they’re standing in. “They’re not flowers to remind us that beautiful things come from death. Wherever they grow, all they signify is that something’s already dead.” 

“Yeah,” Yang says, still creeping towards the treeline; the fog makes it dangerous to move too fast or too loudly, especially when they don’t know what’s lurking in it. “I had a similar train of thought myself.” 

Yang’s, previously in bloom across her wrist; now its petals are dying. Good. It deserves to starve. 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to agree.

Yang rests her hand on the nearest trunk of the tree, peering through the woods. “It must be gone,” she says. "I'll let him know."

She opens her scroll, taps his name from her contact. Two, three, four rings. 

" _Yang_?" he says tiredly when he answers. " _Are you okay?_ "

"Yeah," Yang says. "We went to the farm, but there's nothing here."

_"What are you talking about?"_

"You know," Yang says, growing impatient. "The wolf? That you just called us about, and said someone saw at the old farm? We came down to check it out, but there’s nothing here."

There's an odd, lurching pause, and the static settles in her stomach like acid. 

Yang feels it, too, that exact same moment. She meets Blake's stare, scroll slipping from her ear.

" _Yang_ ," they both hear Qrow say carefully, faintly echoing through the speaker. _"I didn't call you."_

And the eyes appear, blinking out of the forest behind her.

\--

“Look out--!” 

But it doesn’t matter if the warning falls in time; the creature - _is_ it a wolf? - is so much _bigger_ than Yang is, with its long, black body and white, skeletal armor; it rears back onto its hind legs, brings down a grotesque, decaying paw, claws like knives--

Blake instinctively turns her gaze away, heaving in terror, folded up in flashbacks; she expects to hear that same cleave of bone she’d heard before, Adam’s sword and a splintering - she expects to hear that same scream, smell that same blood. Expects Yang to die, just as the universe had declared her to be until they ignored it.

Once the roaring in her ears dies down, she pulls herself out of it, away from the memories that never stop consuming her - she tears her eyes open, hands digging into the dirt, the word _coward_ sitting in her skull with an echo, mind rebelling against the scene she’s sure is in front of her--

Only it isn’t. And she can’t make sense of what she’s seeing instead at all. 

When they were younger, there’d been times Yang’d seemed to faintly glow in the dark-drenched corners of the night, with her eyes reflecting the blood moon through the slanted shutters of Blake’s window and her mouth licking like fire. Skin of embers, irises of hot coal. And her hair. Hair wild over her shoulders, her chest, her back. Spread out across Blake’s sheets, across Blake’s thighs. Blonde and blonder and a soft, crackling light.

She’d thought she was seeing things, then. Thought she loved a girl so much she made her a god, mythologized her, created a folktale so gorgeous and enormous it’d surpass the one they actually lived in. 

Now she knows she wasn’t.

Engulfed in flame - that’s the first image her brain offers, and quickly rejects. Yang, standing with her left arm blocking a blow that should’ve broken the bone in half; Yang, with her hair like a wildfire and her eyes a scalding red. Yang isn’t being consumed by it. She’s the source of it. 

The beast unsteadily lowers, thrown off. Whatever it is - monster, undead, evil - it is also primarily _animal,_ and it behaves as such, instincts propelling it forward. But Yang seems to have _her_ own, too, though Blake can’t even begin to imagine where they come from - where do you learn to fight horror stories - then again, she’d always been the strong one; the brave one, reckless one, ready to throw herself in front of a sword or a knife or death itself.

And after she watches Yang beat the creature down, fists tearing through what’s left of its skin, cracking through the visible bone, grasping its neck and snapping it with a sickening _crunch,_ Blake knows why.

Death should’ve been afraid of _her._

Maybe it was, Blake thinks. Maybe that’s why she was chosen to begin with.

\--

Power. That’s the only thing Yang comprehends: the monster swings, hits her, and she absorbs it, weaves it into her muscles, lines her veins with it. She wants more, wants to be hit again, wants to deliver it back until the creature lies rotting, until the forest covers it in fungi, mold, moss. 

It’s grotesque up-close - someone’s old marionette, a creation that had been regretted upon birth and attempted to be destroyed. Parts missing and oozing flesh. Pieces of its skeleton on the outside, as if a feeble attempt at protection. Empty, hollow sockets in its skull, with a strange orange glow emitting from deep inside. Lolling tongue, drooling mouth, every inch rotting. And the smell - like opening up a poorly-sealed coffin years after burial, being hit with the intense, abrupt stench of decay. And despite its appearance, it’s _strong._

Well, from her experience: if you don’t kill something right the first time, it’s even harder the second. She thinks of the mark on her wrist, thinks of Adam - thinks of all the people she loves standing in a circle, darkness crouching on their shoulders. Thinks of Blake, begging her to live forever. Blake, thrown against the roots of a tree, hands digging so deeply into the shadowed dirt she may as well be burying herself in it, sinking just to get away from the terrifying visions, the flashbacks. Her strangled voice, her frozen form - Yang recognizes this fear all too well, and it’s not in her control at all.

She decides, from that split second on - staring the animal in the face, its slick, waxy fur tight between her fingers - that she’ll never bleed in front of Blake again. 

And something inside of her listens.

Because when she balls her fist and smashes it straight through the creature’s malformed, twisted grin, shattering its teeth down into its throat, her knuckles come away clean and unbroken. And when she takes its head in her arms and breaks its neck, claws tearing at her clothes, not even a single red line forms underneath.

\--

"I don't understand," Yang murmurs, staring at her hands, flexing and clenching her fingers into fist. Blake hovers a few feet away, back on her feet and wary. The creature - whatever it is, ash, tar, fungi - seems to disintegrate against the earth, like it can't hold form unless it's alive to rot. 

“Are you okay?” she gasps, faltering on a step. “Yang, are you - are you okay?”

Yang's not sure why it sounds so loaded, piled in unknowns and implications. She turns her gaze outward instead of inward, notices the distance, the uncertainty - it's not something she thought she'd feel between them ever again, and it reroutes her.

"Are you - _afraid_ of me?" she asks, incredulity soaking in her tone.

"No," Blake says, but gestures helplessly to her as if to say, _what, you don't feel that?_ "You're just - you're on _fire_." She pauses, taking inventory. "And your eyes - I - I always thought I was imagining it." 

"Imagining what?" 

"They're red," she says, and takes another tentative step forward, examining her. "Sometimes - even before this - I swore they were." She extends a hand, hesitates, but continues course; her fingertips brush Yang's cheek. "You're burning up."

"I feel," Yang says, but doesn't have the words to describe it - it's only images in her head, concepts, pyramids and labyrinths, armor and iron, blood that does what it is told and a high sun at midnight. But it is also draining, now, with her adrenaline, the danger over and the monster slain.

"Are you hurt?" Blake says, and watches her eyes cycle hue back to their natural, soft lavender. Her hair must be fading, too, because Blake's posture begins to relax - until the panic settles in. "You - I mean, Yang, it _hit_ you, it really - are you _hurt?_ " She's finally processing her shock and its stakes, how Yang could've been torn to pieces and she only could've hidden her face and melted away. She frets around Yang's face, her arms, her body. "Oh, my god - are you - are you bleeding? Your shirt--"

“It - it _did_ hurt _,_ ” Yang breathes out, gazing at her own arm in awe, “but I'm not. I _felt_ it. Every blow. But it only - it made me feel...stronger. And I just - it took over.” She turns it over, tracing her veins like she expects them to be red, too. 

“Your wrist,” Blake says wonderingly, and tugs down her sleeve for a better look. “What...what _is_ that?” 

The flower that had once marked her dead has disappeared entirely; no roots, no petals, no face searching for sun. 

The only thing left on her wrist is a symbol of a heart on fire.

\--

Using their scrolls after that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but they’ve got few other choices. They have to alert the rest of them _somehow,_ and a lot can happen in the fifteen minutes it’d take them getting back to Neptune’s. Not to mention it’s getting later, and there’s even less reality in the dark.

"Trust _nothing,_ do you understand?" Yang says, speaking into Blake’s scroll, held aloft between them. "We _heard_ his voice, Sun. It was Qrow, except it wasn't."

It takes a moment for Sun to respond, digesting yet another piece of unbelievable information. " _So why should I trust you telling me this?_ " he points out. " _What if_ you _are really the monster--_ "

"Well, Sun, if _we_ were the monster," Blake chimes in, "we probably wouldn't be telling you _not_ to trust us, would we?"

"Or divulging an aspect of its power, previously unknown?" Yang tacks on sarcastically. 

" _Well now I know it's you, because you're an asshole._ " There's a noise in the background, and Weiss's voice, muffled. They can't hear exactly what she says, but Sun replies, " _It's Blake and Yang. They said some weird shit happened, and we shouldn't trust anything_." Another pause. " _Hey, someone check if Oscar's real - what? I don't know. Threaten to beat him up._ "

" _We can't beat up a_ child _,_ " is the first thing they hear Weiss say clearly, scandalized.

"Okay," Blake says, head in her hands, "don't do that."

" _Nevermind,_ " Sun calls. " _Blake doesn't want us punching children either, apparently. Even if they're fake."_

" _I'm real!_ " Oscar shouts indignantly. “ _And I’m not a child!_ ” 

"Holy shit," Yang breathes out, trying to focus on the road. "There's no way we’re keeping any of these morons alive."

" _I heard that, bitch._ "

"Good," she says, and catches a glimpse of her wrist as she turns the wheel. "That’s how you know I’m real. And Sun, tell Pyrrha - tell her ‘me, too’.” 

\--

At home again, but the concept of it becomes less and less. Home is nothing but walls and wood when what you’re afraid of won’t get tired of waiting for you. 

Qrow doesn’t leave, situated in the downstairs living room with a bottle, in a chair facing the window. He’d only grunted at their return, and his eyes had lingered briefly on her wrist before fixating on a point outside. She looks, but she’s only met with tall grass and melting snow, glinting underneath the moonlight. She doesn’t think she wants to know what he sees, and how it’s consuming him.

“Do you think we all have one?” Blake asks, tracing the fresh lines of her new mark. Hers is the same as it’s been, a bud on the brink of bloom. “What do you think it means?” 

“I don’t know,” Yang answers both questions at once. She tries to draw on the power she’d felt before, but there’s no access route, no need for survival instincts; her muscles flex, veins still blue. Tonight, her skin is warm, and her eyes are lavender. “I feel like we know less than we did before.” 

“Yeah,” Blake says quietly, and intertwines their fingers together instead. “You - what you did today…” 

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help.” Lying down, Blake turns her face into Yang’s shoulder, presses close. “I saw it swinging for you, and I--”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Yang says. “I know.” 

“I saw him,” Blake says. “Adam. Before we left. And he just - he stuck there.” 

She doesn’t need to clarify; Yang understands she means _I saw him, but it was only in my head, and when the claws came down I only saw the sword._ Post-traumatic stress has played its tricks on her mind, too. 

“I also saw something,” she confesses, because if she’s honest then their secrets can’t hurt them. “It was that same - that same _creature._ Just sitting in the middle of the street.” 

Blake asks a different question, playing with her fingers now. Counting the lines of her knuckles. “What do you think it wants?” 

“Us.” Nothing she’s seen has ever been forgotten, nor will it be. She thinks that is its true goal before it kills them: make them afraid. “I think it wants to turn us against each other. Like Qrow. Make us doubt who we are - and who we love,” she finishes softly.

That’s all they have, really. Tenderness in the face of uncertain life. Kindness, when everything else is cruel. 

“Well, it won’t work,” Blake says, stunning in her confidence, something Yang’s felt for maybe minutes at a time before being ripped out from underneath her, ripped off like a bandaid exposing bullet holes. 

“Why not?” 

“Because,” Blake says, and touches her lips to Yang’s neck. “I’d know you anywhere.”

\--

Ruby has _other_ ideas.

They’ve survived another night, though what it’s waiting for, she isn’t sure - only that there’s more to be uncovered than any of them have hands to carry it all. 

She takes them back to the ritual site.

Well, _some_ of them. 

Sun and Neptune decide their time is better utilized assisting Ilia with her research, which Ruby translates to mean ‘fuck no, we’d rather die’. Though Neptune gets a slight pass as his family _is_ the one with the library, and can definitely grant Ilia access to anything she’s been unable to reach. 

And at this point, it’s best to leave no stone unturned - or cracked completely in half.

“Something doesn’t make sense to me,” Ruby says, kicking at the stone. It’s completely undisturbed, exactly as they’d left it; the knife hilt sticks out of the leaves, which have begun to pile up. “Qrow said - she didn’t _fight._ Like she knew something.” She stops there, thoughts flying too fast to make sense of them, and each more unlikely than the last. “What did she _know?_ ” 

“Well, let’s think,” Pyrrha says, always level-headed and logical. “Raven wasn’t herself that night. How did he put it? Like something was inside of her.” 

“Yang described it similarly,” Weiss says, distantly examining the old, faded letters. “She’s been seeing things.” 

“We all have,” Ruby says, and Weiss looks up curiously. 

“You’ve been seeing things, too?” she asks, now with a hint of concern; if it’s spreading, an infection - if it’s gaining power--

“What?” Ruby says, and glances strangely at her. “No. Not yet, at least.” 

“What?” Weiss echoes. “But you _just_ said, ‘we all have’.” 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Um,” she says, but decides to let it go; Pyrrha’s pretending to study the knife, but she’s too still and silent. “My mistake. I’m probably just tired.” 

“So, anyway--” Ruby continues, and starts replaying what they already know, and what they’ve discussed a thousand times; like she thinks being somewhere both old and new, familiar yet not - a place that used to crackle with electricity, that used to crush them under its heels - will _spark_ something, a light sifting through the trees, an angle they couldn’t see. 

Weiss doesn’t _like_ being here. 

The other three seem to find it a perfectly normal place now, devoid of the oppression that once engulfed it, but Weiss still senses that _chill_ : the first scent of snow; the smallest hint of ice. Like someone’s breathing on her neck. 

“We’re all seeing things, aren’t we, Weiss?” Ruby’s voice murmurs in her ear, just as Weiss touches the trunk of the tree. 

She doesn’t need to spin around, confirm what she already knows.

Blake and Yang, it seems, aren’t the only two with ghosts.

Her father is standing ten feet away from her, nestled neatly between the trees. His white suit’s pressed and clean, his hands clasped behind his back. This is how he looks in her memories, when he sits her down and tells her she should be grateful to be alive at all. Not like her mother, too self-medicated to even process the time passing. Not like her sister, risking her life for the military. 

She shouldn’t be compelled to step closer, but she is. The rest of them are gone, now, quietly retreating to the dirt, if they ever existed at all. Maybe Pyrrha was a dream she made up to escape the horrors of her own reality. Maybe Ruby was her brain’s idea of hope personified, a last-ditch attempt at some semblance of a reality. Maybe Jaune was her listening to herself and offering advice back, like a lonely twist of her subconscious, desperate for company. 

There’s an odd tapping to the back of her head. She shouldn’t be compelled to look, but she is.

The bodies of her mother and her sister hanging from the tree. Skin blanched and decaying, stretched too tightly across their faces, teeth rotting in their mouths; they both smile, eyeless sockets in their skulls. 

“That’s a good girl, Weiss,” her father says, and now he’s directly in front of her. “Do as you’re told, and die.” 

\--

The knife, they determine, is definitely made of bone - but they have no idea what the blade is composed of, only that it isn’t metal, as it doesn’t respond to Pyrrha at all. 

“Why wouldn’t she fight back?” Ruby repeats, the three of them kneeling around it and analyzing it in turn. “Someone is coming at you with a knife. Why don’t you fight _back?_ ” 

“Maybe she thought it was her time,” Jaune says, downtrodden and shrugging. “Maybe she’d just...accepted it.” 

But that doesn’t fit; not with Summer’s _knowing,_ with her purposeful immobility, with the denial of the rest of them. Something was inside of Raven. Something that wanted Summer dead - that wanted Summer fighting - that wanted - yes--

“Or maybe,” Ruby says, turning over the knife in her hands, “she knew that two bodies were better than one.” She presses her thumb to the tip of the blade. “Maybe that’s what it wanted. Her to fight back, and both of them to die.”

“What,” Pyrrha says slowly, “like... it was hungry, she was trying to _starve_ it?” 

“Think about it,” Ruby says, shooting up, an excitement to her that probably shouldn’t be there when discussing her own mother’s ritualistic murder. “If the entire legend has been a lie, and our families agreed to sacrifice one of their own during the darkest times in history to...to suppress something _good,_ in order to get what they wanted,” she’s breathing a little too heavily, “is it so far-fetched? It’s the same principle, isn’t it? We were keeping the curse intact - by _feeding_ it. By believing in it. By never talking to each other, until the day one of us dies.” 

“Hang on,” Jaune says, and he stands too, but it’s harder for him to get a clear grip on things. He starts checking off events on his fingers, like marking a calendar. “Okay. Twenty-five years ago, our families screw up the ritual by refusing to participate in it. I’ve got that. The stone cracks, because...the curse isn’t fed, and that’s its conduit.” They all glance to the obsidian stone, lifeless and useless. He puts down another finger. “Two years later, it...what, fights back?” 

“Yes!” Pyrrha says, following suit. “It’s about our perspective, isn’t it? If we’re told something our whole lives, it’s easy to believe it. But if we reframe what we’ve been told - the magic itself is dark. And it’s granting _power_ to something dark - something that was strong enough to place the curse in the first place.” 

“So when we deprive it of that power,” Ruby finishes, “it fights back! That’s what it did with Raven. That’s what Summer knew. It was the curse, fighting back.” 

“Oh, what an interesting theory,” they all hear in Weiss’s voice, coming from behind them. “Summer would be _so_ proud to see you now.”

Except she isn’t the one speaking.

How could she be, with her head locked in the grasp of a creature so tall its head touches the bottom branch of the tree, its skull and ribcage exposed with its flesh turned charred black. Its long, spindly fingers wrap underneath her chin, and in the blink of an eye - before Pyrrha can even move, before Ruby can get a grip on a knife she isn’t even sure can be used - it snaps her neck.

She drops like a stone, like an anvil, like a meteor striking the earth. The sound rings in their ears, sickeningly distorted. Jaune can’t look away from her body. It’s a joke. It’s a twisted, fucked-up gag, and she’ll get up any minute, she’ll settle her neck back on her shoulders and smile, she’ll spear the creature through the heart--

When she doesn’t move after three, four, five seconds, Pyrrha finally screams.

And she isn’t the only one. 

Ruby lets out a cry so guttural he swears it shakes the earth right down to its core, and then there’s _light._

Like the light that had burst out of the tomb, only several days before - brighter than any star, more striking than any explosion. It engulfs everything before them, and when it touches the monster - its elongated frame, its misshapen limbs, the sickeningly red glow emitting from its empty sockets - it _evaporates_ , frozen until it turns to dust.

And Weiss is still dead.

Jaune crawls over to her, slipping on the mud. Pyrrha’s already there, Weiss’s head cradled in her lap, but it’s too late - her lips are turning blue, her face is bloodless, her eyes empty and unseeing--

“No,” Jaune says blankly, his hands covering her own. He thinks of Weiss as a teenager, his silly crush evolving into friendship, her cruelty that had turned into a kindness deeper than he ever would’ve imagined she was capable of. “No, no, no--” 

“Do something!” Pyrrha screams at them, tears dripping from her chin to Weiss’s cold cheek. “Do _something_!”

She matches the snow she’s spread out against. November is her grave. Suddenly Sun’s jokes about sacrificing her aren’t so funny, anymore. 

What’s even crueler is that it doesn’t change anything.

Her death doesn’t serve a purpose or feed a curse. The stone is broken and remains so; the tree is still dying. No darkness gains any power by killing her. It’s just unnecessary. A waste. Sadistic.

“I can’t,” he whispers, tears welling in his own eyes. He’s grasping her hand so hard it’d hurt her, if she were alive to feel it. “I - I _can’t._ I don’t know how.” 

It’s the image of Ruby, falling to her knees, blank and hopeless for the first time. It’s Pyrrha, breaking apart like her world has ended. It’s Weiss, who loved harder than any of them and died proving it.

“Please,” he sobs, rocking back and forth. “Please!” he begs again, pressing her hand to his forehead and willing himself away. He’ll trade his life. There’s no point to it without Weiss, because without Weiss, there’s less laughter, less love, _less_. “ _Please!_ ” 

His own heart throbs once inside of his chest, out of sync and uncomfortable, and then stops beating entirely.

Somehow he’s still alive, but it can’t be for long. He clutches at his chest, mouth opening and closing, throat sewing itself shut - his lungs are full of blood, his veins are full of ice, his head is full of light and cracking-- 

Weiss jerks her hand out of his grasp, eyelids flinging open as she gasps for air. And when he jolts up from the shock of it, he finds he can breathe again, too. 

“Weiss?” Pyrrha whispers with her chest still heaving, fingers brushing Weiss’s hair away from her face. “Weiss?” 

_No trade necessary_ , he hears in his own mind - though from where, he isn’t sure. _Too many lives have been taken that shouldn’t have been. Use it sparingly._

“Okay,” Jaune says, breathing deeply as Pyrrha clings to her, weeping into her shoulder. “I don’t think I’ll be allowed to do that too many times, so, like - if nobody else could die, that’d be great.” 

\--

“Where did you go?” Pyrrha murmurs later, still in shock, mapping every curve and line and indent of her body. They’re holed up in Yang and Ruby’s house again, because it’s the closest, and the most familiar, and so well-loved. “Where did you _go?_ ”

It isn’t a darkness surrounding her, she tries to explain, and it isn’t a light, either. 

It’s nothing. 

A boundless emptiness. An in-between. A bridge. A tidepool; a gas station. A lamp, flickering on; a moth, burning its wings. A library and an ice shelf. A floating city. A gold mine.

A grave.

There’s a patch of dirt beside her, and a hole that needs filling in. Or letting out. It needs a prayer or a birthday card. A cigar, a crystal vase. She gazes into it, cycling through a list like a menu. A rope? A hand? Should she climb down, or give a lift to whatever’s stuck? Is that her name, being called like a dial tone? Is that her reflection, counting pennies in a candy jar? 

No. It isn’t her at all. Nothing is her except whatever’s above her head, and possibly below it. Her neck at an odd angle. Her arm unstitched. Something’s coming. Something that belongs to her. 

Head made of bone, skin made of ice. Ribs of diamond and expanding, upside-down and outward. Crooked spine, limbs elongated and grotesque. 

The creature that killed her, forced to repent. 

She touches her palm to its body, and a circle appears. Rotating in the air, a white thin line. Then comes an arrow, one at a time, evenly spaced from the other; a point, a diamond. It memorizes the imprint, like storing data. The monster isn’t her father, or her sister, or her mother. 

No, no. There is _power_ in death, if you’re clever enough to unlock it.

The monsters answer to _her,_ now. 

And the Bridge, Weiss says, with her pale eyes like half-moons in the night and a snowflake imprinting on her wrist; the Bridge is hers, too, and whatever comes to pass has to ask her fucking permission to use it.

\--

“You fucking _died?_ ” Yang says. “Like, you were literally, clinically _dead?_ ” 

“Yes, Yang,” Weiss responds boredly for the tenth time, scowling at the dirt underneath her nails. 

“That’s so badass,” Sun says, awed, sitting by her feet on the floor. “You control _dead_ shit now?” 

“I haven’t tried it,” Weiss says, following the lifeline of her palm before neatly closing her hand into a fist. “But I can _feel_ it.” 

Ilia, who’d literally flown halfway across Remnant to try and unearth potentially life-saving information, has clearly had enough of the knock-off superhero movie they’re all in. “Okay, great. Sorry you died, Weiss, glad you’re still with us. Everyone’s a hero, yada yada yada. Now, did anyone actually _learn_ anything today, or was that just me?” 

She waits for a response, just in case she’s proven wrong. Ruby raises her hand tentatively. 

“I have a theory,” she says. 

“Permission to share, granted,” Ilia allows, and pulls out her notebook. 

She recalls the narrative they’d crafted that afternoon, and the haunting response from its subject matter. Confirmation. Mocking them.

For a moment, silence, and then-- “Is it getting bolder,” Blake says tentatively, “or just more powerful?” 

“Oscar’s here,” Sun replies helpfully. “Let’s have a seance.” 

“Okay, that’s not really how it works--” 

“You’re smart, Ruby,” Qrow murmurs, interrupting the inevitable banter. “We never made it that far. But dark magic like this - like what’s happening now - needs a source.” He pointedly glances at each of their wrists in turn. “And maybe other types of magic do, too.” 

“I told you,” Oscar says. “What you released wasn’t - isn’t what you’ve been seeing. And it isn’t what killed Weiss. That’s always been there, but now...like Ruby said...it’s lashing out.” 

“So where’s all this _‘good’_?” Neptune quotes the word sarcastically. “We’ve got some fucked-up force imitating our friends and families, hacking our fucking scrolls, sending _monsters_ after us - where’s the _good?_ ” 

“Are you really this stupid?” Ilia says, and puts down her pencil. “Look around you, moron. It’s _you._ ” 

\--

What Ilia’s learned - from a historical archive so old, she’s positive nobody besides her has ever read it, let alone knows it exists - is that the founding date of their town coincides with the day The War ended. 

She says ‘The War’ because there’s only one in their world’s collective mythology that holds enough power to be defined by it. There’s no definitive start, and no clear ending, but it’s the oldest legend in existence: the creation of the modern world, when people abandoned their magic and proceeded into the future with technology. 

“Some of it is really racist, like, ‘humans and monsters came together and forged the Faunus’,” she says, rolling her eyes and speaking incredibly fast. “But as I understand it--” 

Blake raises a hand, similar to Ruby. “Uh, Classics major, here,” she says, pointing at herself. “So if you want someone with a _degree_ in it, let me know.” 

“Blake,” Ilia says, “the floor is yours.” 

“We need like a speaking stick, or something,” Neptune says. “Like what they give you in kindergarten so you don’t talk out of turn.” 

“ _Okay,_ ” Blake begins, and clears her throat. “I’m going to tell the abridged version because we’re all, like, about to die, and don’t really have time for storytelling.”

“Shout out to Weiss, who’s already died.” 

“Shut up, Sun.” 

“ _So anyway,_ ” Blake says. “Thousands of years ago, people believed in gods. There were two that were notable: the God of Light, and the God of Darkness. They were believed to have holy residences on the earth, like temples, where people could go and make requests, wishes, or just pay offerings.” It’s a strange thing to imagine, as their current world is almost entirely secular. “It was believed that magic, which used to be commonplace, was a gift from them to humanity. Except, of course, the Gods were arrogant bastards, and got annoyed when humanity didn’t use it the way they wanted them to, and so humanity rose up against them.

“The Gods, it’s said, abandoned earth - this is where the myth tends to split in many different directions, but I’ll stick with the popularized version - and humanity turned the war on itself. With nobody to blame, they blamed a woman they believe had ignited it in the first place.”

“Ugh,” Ilia says under her breath. “People _always_ blame women.” 

Blake tries not to laugh, but comes dangerously close. She’s building an atmosphere here. “The Gods, when they existed, retained and gained their power through belief. This is a pretty common element of any myth you’ll find with Gods - when more people believe in them, the more power they have. But it was the same with magic. 

“The woman, who was mourning over her lost love, blamed the Gods. And once they were gone, the rest of humanity blamed her. That’s how legends are born; to assign meaning to what we can’t otherwise explain. The woman became a representation of darkness: Walking alone on the earth, Godless and loveless, all she had was the power given to her by those who believed the stories. 

“It’s said that the God of Light, in his _benevolence,_ granted the lost love - a hero, who’d saved so many - an opportunity to save one more. The man agreed. And so the man became _good,_ and people believed those stories, too.

“That’s the myth of The War. That the woman had grown so dark and the man so pure that they could no longer touch each other - only the world around them.”

Sun, enraptured, starts to applaud; his tail swings behind him, almost hitting Jaune in the face. 

“Thank you, Blake, resident Classics major with an excellent memory,” Ilia says, as eager to push on as ever. “Now, taking all that into consideration, I repeat: the day this town was founded coincides with an approximate date historians believe the war to have ended, and the decline of magic. I think there’s some myth about a final battle, a night in which waves of Grimm - which is what monsters used to be referred to as - fought the wielders of light, and they all killed each other, or something. It’s not important.” Blake tuts under her breath. 

“Ilia,” Ruby says. “You’re smarter than all of us. Weiss literally just died like three hours ago. What are you _saying_?” 

“Your _families,_ ” Ilia says slowly, pronouncing every syllable, “made a _deal_ with _darkness_. To suppress _light._ Which took _balance_ from the world, rendering magic _obsolete._ And without magic, there was no longer a need to explain it.” 

“The stories gave it power,” Yang says. “When the stories became few and far between, it had _us,_ still believing them.”

“Exactly,” Ilia says, and beams at her, like she’d give her a gold star on a homework assignment if she could. It’s the T.A. in her, Blake thinks. 

But then they’re all left silent. 

“So now what?” Jaune says, and Ilia doesn’t have an answer for that.

Something else does, though, peering through the window.

\--

It hits the house with such force that the foundation shakes, rattling the doors and cabinets and cupboards, things falling from the shelves. 

“What was that?” Oscar squeaks, cowering in the corner. 

The lights flicker, a telltale warning sign. Ruby’s faster on her feet and lights a candle just as the power goes out. It throws shadows across the room, their faces, their reflections in the window. Yang’s hand finds Blake’s and doesn’t let go. She won’t. Not again. 

And she doesn’t, even when the window shatters inward, glass spraying across the floor. She doesn’t, even when a black, smoking arm shoots towards Blake’s throat, its thin fingers stretched wide and its claws sharper than the fangs it smiles with. She doesn’t, even when Blake takes one terrified step backward and falls into her own shadow.

But Blake does. 

Blake lets go, and suddenly she’s gone.

\--

It’s Pyrrha with the quickest instincts, who skewers the arm into a wall with a large kitchen knife; she holds up her hand, forces the metal deeper, and deeper, and deeper. 

The _thing_ \- though now that it’s been said, _Grimm_ is the perfect name for it - screeches so loudly it buckles their knees, attempting to tug its ruined arm free. The sound alone aches, and cuts, and drains. Ruby with her arm on the counter, candle resting on the table. Sun panting, leaning against a wall. Yang, still staring at the spot Blake had vanished, trying to make sense of it all.

But Weiss looks at it and only sees the bodies - her mother, her sister, and herself, hanging from a tree. Sees her father praising her as she dies. Hears Pyrrha’s scream, somewhere in the recess of her mind. 

No, Weiss looks at it - its gaping jaw with its flesh tearing at the corners, and its twisted, malformed spine - and only sees revenge.

When she spreads her fingers and summons, it’s simpler than breathing; but considering she’d just died, perhaps that’s not quite the right comparison. She envisions that same strange glyph she’d seen in her death, and watches as it materializes in front of her, shape taking form. A memory. A work order. 

It’s like placing a call. Like sending an elevator. The Bridge is there, clawing at the skin of reality, and only she can bring whatever’s trapped there back. 

The creature that murdered her emerges from the glyph, one arm at a time, and pulls itself out of hell, ready to slaughter its kin. A glittering pale blue, like ice. 

And one arm at a time, it rips its counterpart limb from limb.

That, Weiss thinks, is true vengeance: take what destroys you, and make it kill itself.

“Well.” Blake’s ominous voice echoes out from the shadows behind Oscar, where the feeble candlelight can’t reach, and he nearly trips over a chair in his haste to get away from her. She emerges from the darkness as if from a thick fog, or a velvet curtain, and her eyes have gained an unnatural gleam to them, two rings reflecting sun. “I can’t say I expected that.”

Her symbol flares out on her wrist, bold and black. Now she has her own fire.

\--

“We have to get out of here!” Pyrrha calls, prying the knife from the wall. “If there’s more, Yang--”

“They’re gonna tear the place down,” Yang finishes, and throws open the back door. “Yeah, I know!” 

She hears Ruby shout something about Oscar, about Ilia, about Tai; and Qrow answers back, reassurances of safety. Yang doesn’t have time to focus on them because when they spill out of the back door and into the field - Weiss’s eerie creature trailing behind them, a soldier waiting for orders - they find the horizon shifting. Stars going out. The trees have mouths and they are open and hungry. The grass screams as it’s stepped on. Something - many, many things - are crawling out of the dirt, and they all look like Summer. 

“It’s not real!” she shouts, tugging on Blake’s hand; Sun and Neptune are still as stone, staring at the ground. She wonders what they’re seeing. Wonders if it’s Sun’s mom and Neptune’s dad. Wonder if Weiss sees those same bodies, or if death has given her clarity. Wonder if Blake sees her. 

“We can’t run!” Weiss calls. “We can’t lead them to the town, either!” 

“Head to the lake!” someone says, those whose voice she can’t be sure over the noise. “Just run!” 

There must be hundreds of them, pushing their way through the soil, the corpse flowers blooming on their backs as their roots fall away. The entire field splits open, earth cracking into its core. A stampede, an avalanche. A graveyard.

And she understands.

The final battle. Flowers that only grow where something has died, and an entire town flourishing with them, no matter what time of the year. Underneath the snow, drinking from the rain, searching for dry, hot sunlight. It’s not a field, surrounding their house. And it’s not a forest surrounding their town, either. 

It’s a mass grave.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Yang utters, and the hoard descends upon them. 

They’re not people anymore - perhaps darkness doesn’t have the power to maintain the illusion, not with this many of them who have such varied nightmares - but similarly black bodies to the wolf, bearing the smell of atrophy; bits of flesh hanging off the bone, hundreds of glowing red eyes, and skulls smooth and white and gleaming underneath the moonlight. They barely know how to fight - half of them are simply lucky, with a previous affinity for boxing or self-defense or martial arts, but the rest-- 

Ruby read the books, but never picked up the skills. Jaune’s never even thrown a punch.

But maybe, Yang thinks, feeling her skin burn hot and veins on fire, just _maybe -_ there’s something else on their side. She believes that. She _believes_ it. 

A hand wraps around Neptune’s ankle, forcing him into the ground, fingernails digging into the dirt, but a copy of Sun helps him pry open its grasp - a creature leaps onto Ruby’s back, but she’s somehow ten feet away in an instant - a monster with its teeth bared, inches from Blake’s neck--

Yang’s fist cracking into skull instead, splitting straight down the middle and emerging through the top of its mouth. Fire flares around her hands, licking up her arms. 

Somewhere in front of her, there’s a flash of light, but it’s interrupted. “There’s too many!” Ruby screams. 

Blake slows her pace, glances behind them - the lake’s just ahead, and after that it’s a dead end. She stops abruptly, and Yang falters, turning back, ready to pick her up and run. 

But then she kneels, and her shadow starts to grow.

It’s almost instinct _,_ but it’s greater than that, too - it’s a _right._ A power she was born with, an element she has an affinity for. A place to hide, or a place to wait and strike. A place she feels safe, and a place other things shouldn’t.

Yang can’t look away - it’s elongated and monstrous, like it’s merging with every other shadow it passes cast underneath the moonlight. Like she’s bending them at will, and contorting the bodies with them.

That’s the thing about shadows, Blake says. They’re always worse in the night.

The creatures start sinking as they charge towards her, as if caught in quicksand or drowning in tar. They snap against the void, clawing at its hollowness - but there’s nothing to touch, and so nothing to fight. It just exists, like a portal, like a doorway, like a black hole. Somewhere only Blake can enter, or so Yang thinks.

Until one by one, the Grimm she kills begin to re-emerge, snarling and swiping and screaming. Not from her own shadows, but from Weiss’s. 

“Thanks, Blake,” she calls, smiling dangerously from only twenty feet away, a sword made of ice in hand and an army growing behind her. 

Out in the treeline, Adam crooks a finger and beckons them.

\--

“Yang.” Blake takes hold of her arm, pulling her back. “It can’t be real. And if it is, it’s a trap.”

“I don’t care _what_ he is,” Yang says intensely, cupping Blake’s face between her hands, irises alight - red like dahlia, red like cosmos, all the flowers she could’ve been. Every inch of her is searing. She could light this world if it lost its sun. “A ghost, a demon - I’ll fight him with my bare hands. And this time, we’ll _win._ ”

No more severed tongues and twitching limbs. No more nightmares, blood flooding alleyways and swords that speak when they drink. No more of Adam, his entitlement and spite and hatred. 

“He’s it, Blake,” Yang says, stoic and fierce. “I can _feel_ it. Whatever this is, the worst of it - it starts and ends with him. I can _feel_ it.”

As strongly as she’d felt her death.

She looks back. Jaune, with his hand on Neptune’s arm, sealing a wound. Sun’s copies with far more strength than he has, carving Grimm apart from the inside-out. Pyrrha pulling iron from the earth, and an entire ruined streetlamp crashing above her. Weiss with her dead, looking like she should be crowned queen of them.

 _Go,_ Ruby mouths when Blake catches her eye, just before she turns to rose petals.

“Okay,” she says, and finds Yang’s mouth with her own. She’s not who she was when she was younger, weaponless and afraid and alone. She’s no longer passive and accepting, opening her ear to anyone with a story and a tragedy. Being sad doesn’t always make it true. 

She’s been thinking, you know. With the revelations of the past few days, and the mysteries still unsolved - Yang’s visions of Summer, Weiss’s hallucinations of her family, Qrow’s voice over the phone when it wasn’t - something’s not _right_ about Adam.

Something never has been. 

They know where he is, without being led there. There’s nothing in these woods except the site of a thousand years’ ritual sacrifice, and if she were in charge of delivering punishment for breaking it, that’s exactly where she’d take herself. 

The tree is dead now, like every other thing in winter. Red leaves decaying on the ground, in the mud, in whatever remains of the snow.

And Adam will soon join it. 

He’s leaning casually against it, that same mask, that same sword, looking exactly as he did when he found them at twenty-two. And she does mean _exactly._

When she thinks about it, Adam’s looked the same her entire life.

“You know, Blake,” he starts conversationally, “you made the right choice, keeping Yang alive.” 

Yang tenses next to her, but won’t make the first strike. Not again. She’s grown since then, in every way imaginable, and she doesn’t know what Adam is but she knows Blake’s right: he’s _off._ A trick or a trap, a manifestation of their physical fear. Thrust into a memory of the worst day of their lives. A wolf, an injection - a rabid infestation and a deadly infection.

But Blake doesn’t take the bait, fall to cowardice like he expects her to. “I know I did.”

“It’ll be much more enjoyable to kill you both together,” he says, hand resting on his sheath; he takes a step forward, and suddenly it’s Yang she’s looking at, eyes blood red and smirk curved wickedly. “Or,” it says in her voice, “make you kill each _other_.” 

And Blake smiles. 

“That won’t work on me,” she says, tone politely ice-cold, and the image flickers. That’s what he’s always been: a projection. A necessity, and a failsafe. And it’s worked on every generation except for theirs, and maybe that’s why it hesitates.

“Is this what you tried with Raven?” Yang asks coolly, spitting failure in its face. “Summer saw right through you.” 

“I’ve been many things,” it says. Another step and it’s Adam again, thumb underneath his sword. No shadow. “Raven would’ve killed them all, if I’d let her. But then there would’ve been nobody left to pass on the legend.”

“Not like that worked, anyway,” Blake points out, still with that same horrible smile. It’s making him angry, and with anger comes exposure. 

“No,” he says amusedly. “No, your parents were far too traumatized to enforce the rules the way the others had.” He shrugs, twirls his sword in his hand. “But it’s free now. We’re all free.” 

His boots, crunching over leaves. Wind ruffling his collar. He’s so solid, in that moment, so tangible--

“ _You_ won’t be,” Yang says, rearing her fist back, and Adam disappears. 

“Fuck,” she hisses, turning frantically around the clearing. “I knew - I _knew_ \--”

“Shh,” Blake whispers, eyes darting between trees. He can be anywhere, appear at any time. “I know.”

He laughs, cold and cruel in her ear, and she ducks on instinct, inches away from the handle of his sword meeting her temple. 

“You don’t stand a chance against me,” he says, and dodges Yang’s return blow, absorbing the energy into his sword. She aims lower, connects a kick to his shin, and he slashes right back into her other arm - brutal, victorious smile, expecting another cleave through the bone, a limb hitting the forest floor - they’re nothing before him, they’re children and he’s the thumb of a god, and she’s--

Completely unharmed. 

“Oh, I thought you knew,” Blake says pleasantly, and takes Yang’s hand - not a scratch, not a scar, only a fire that makes a wick of her veins. Behind her, a void stretches out, and it has bite. “We can _become_ , too.” 

\--

It isn’t like her nightmares: only of their abstractions. 

Adam may move like shadow, but Blake is what becomes it. Disappearing one second, reappearing the next; Yang lighting the way, all fury and passion and ferocity. Irises a red he’s learning he should fear and footsteps treading carefully through the clearing. 

He doesn’t have a shadow, not all the time. Only when he’s waiting for opportunity. Only when he’s waiting to strip Yang of her skin, shatter every bone. 

You’ll break eventually, he says, and he is everywhere at once. They always do.

Yang thinks of Raven, the mother she could’ve had if he hadn’t fed her mind to the wolves. She thinks of Summer, the mother she _did_ have, who loved Raven so much she let herself be fed to worse. And she thinks of Blake, who she never should’ve loved at all, and how she wouldn’t have if he’d gotten his way.

They are what lives inside of her. And nothing - not even a thousand year-old curse - can take that from her.

She is a solar system collapsing. She is a star, consuming itself. She is an unbreakable moment between birth and destruction, toppled and built up, every hit making her brighter, and stronger, and bigger. 

Like that day in her room; like she’ll grow, and grow, and grow, too tall for the earth, too large for her body, so magnificent she makes it all anew. 

Blake weaves in and out of shadow, tying thread between them; in Yang’s, out her own, from the trees, out of the leaves. They bridge to each other and reach, empty and gaping. He’d fit so nicely, in the quiet and lonely dark.

She knows what they’re fighting now. And she knows the lengths it’ll go to to defend itself.

There’s one thing that can kill him, she realizes. One thing made of exactly what he is, with just enough power left to feed itself.

She catches Yang’s eye, and nods. 

Adam takes advantage of the brief, pivotal interlude, and slams Yang to the ground; Blake cries out, throws herself over Yang’s body. 

Everything in Adam’s hands, within his reach. Exactly where they want it.

And he cracks the handle of his sword against her skull.

“You were always so _beautiful,_ Blake,” Adam whispers sickeningly, stroking from her cheeks to her temples to her human ears. “So _beautiful._ ” He starts to gather her hair as she’s disoriented from the blow, struck immobile; it’s almost like he’s the mortician, readying her for the funeral. “You should’ve died, my love. You would’ve been truly beautiful then.”

And then he wraps her long hair around his fist and sharply jerks her head back, causing her to gasp in pain. 

But she meets Yang’s eyes and mouths _don’t_. 

Her opportunities are slim, and this is one of them. When he makes himself real to attack them physically, rather than mentally. When he’s so real he has a shadow. When it’s close enough that she can slip her hand inside of it, and make it her own. 

Her fingers close around the handle of the knife, all the way across the clearing, and subtly pull it through. 

“What now, Yang Xiao Long?” he torments comically, Blake still playing limp in his arms. “When I have her, right here. So easy to kill, and that’s why it had to be you.” 

“I’m not following,” Yang says shortly, wary gaze trained on Blake. Defensive. Playing every part she needs to.

“You were the one who wanted them all,” he says. “Blake only wanted you. That would’ve been enough for her. But you were greedy, Yang. You wanted them all to love you, just like you loved them.” He laughs loudly. “Blake was a coward. All she ever did was _run._ ”

Oh, love, she thinks. Isn’t it fitting that that’s what it all comes down to.

With her hair still balled up in his hand, it’s a perfect distraction to raise the knife - and in a quick, smooth motion, she cuts it all off. 

Strands fall loose over his fingers, black strokes of midnight. The action takes him a moment to process, and by the time he does, it’s far too late. 

Because by the time he does, Adam’s own shadow has its hand around his throat. And he can’t escape that.

“I’m not who I was, Adam,” Blake murmurs, and now all the shadows of the forest are stretching with every collective breath, branches growing hands, leaves growing fingers. Wrapping around his wrists and sprouting in his spine. Something is in the forest with them tonight, and they’re going to drain it dry. “You might control the monsters, but I control what even they’re afraid of in the dark.” 

He can’t speak, voice cut off at the source. He’s the one without the tongue. He’ll be inhaling blood. Yang takes the knife, and snaps it cleanly in half.

“Now I can be everywhere,” Blake says, fingers around the handle, blade against the skin of his throat. “Now I can haunt you the way you’ve haunted me.” 

She positions the point into his jugular, just as Yang presses the tip into his heart.

 _Find what you love_ , Blake thinks, driving the blade into Adam’s throat, _and break the world for it._

\--

“I know what he was,” she says after, their hands entwined and watching his body disappear into the darkness. “He was a survival instinct.” 

“What do you mean?” Yang asks.

“How wounded animals snarl, and snap, and bite,” she says. “The magic was hungry, and aside from you, I was the biggest threat. It sent him to scare me. So we wouldn’t starve it.” His sword, sinking into shadow. “He was its last defense mechanism that almost worked. I don’t know if he was ever real.” 

And then they hear calling in the woods, their names in worry, their friends desperate for reassurances and crashing through the brush. Neptune bursts through first, and he looks as if he’d fallen in the lake; Sun follows after, then Ruby, Jaune, Pyrrha, and Weiss, who’d clearly been having a leisurely stroll and - looks--

\--Rather disappointed; Yang thinks she should almost be offended. “I was up to like, fifty,” she complains. “And then they all just...stopped. And sunk. Like they were rotting.” She pauses, taking them in. “Blake, honey - I know you just went through something probably traumatic for the thirtieth time this week, but - your _hair._ ” She wants to stop, but can’t seem to help herself. “Your _split ends!_ ” 

“Adam is dead,” Blake says, ignoring her completely, still staring at the red blade vanishing under the dirt. “And I think the curse - I think the curse is actually, finally broken.”

And then there is nothing. The shadows recede; the tree is just a tree, the stone just a stone, and whatever magic used to be bound here is long-gone, spreading further by the second. 

“But it’s still out there,” Jaune says. “And it’s stronger than whatever we let go.” 

“No matter what we do, we give it power,” Yang says. “If we’re afraid of it, we make it something worth fearing. And we can’t contain it without...without bringing back the curse we broke to get here in the first place!” She throws up her hands. “Where’s the little psychic boy, doesn’t he have a fortune he can read us or something--”

“He speaks like a fucking sphynx,” Sun says, nixing that idea. “He’ll be like, ‘answer my riddle and I’ll grant you a wish,’ and I’m like, ‘okay, I’m good, I’m just gonna consult the 8-ball. Thanks though’.” 

“You’re mixing up sphinxes and genies.” 

“Whatever.” 

“People don’t know,” Blake interrupts, and looks purposefully at Yang, at all of them. “They don’t _know_ what happened here. What’s been happening for years.”

“So we tell them,” Ruby says, like it’s just that simple. “If one horrible myth fed it for generations because our families alone believed it - what will happen to the world if we tell them the truth? About everything?” 

“And you think that’ll work?” Pyrrha says dubiously. “You think if we - we tell people what happened, and how we - triumphed, I suppose, we’ll contain its power?” 

“I think we’ll balance it,” Weiss says. “Who knows what the world will look like now - maybe there are _more_ of these monsters, and they’re waiting to attack other towns and other people.” She pretends not to relish in the idea of adding more creatures to her collection. 

But it’s Yang who sways them; Yang who’d swayed them in the first place. Who, at sixteen, had fallen in love with a girl who made her believe she could save the world, and then made them believe it, too.

And maybe it was time they did.

“I think we were told a lie our entire lives,” Yang says, tilting her head towards the sky, and when she breathes she exhales steam. “I’m done. I want a new story, even if we have to write it ourselves. One without rituals, or knives, or blood. Where nobody dies.” She pauses, the words getting stuck in her throat. “Where the people who died became something.” 

Where the people who died live on.

\--

Their existence is no longer a secret, but isn’t publicized, either.

It’s spread through whispers and witnesses, poems and mythology and song. Some tell the tale of a white-haired woman who spawned an army to free a city, while the red-haired one rebuilt its walls. Some say there’s a medic who only works battlefields and makes deals with death, shaving time off his own life to spare theirs. And some talk of a man who stopped a flood, while another created copies of himself to save its victims.

Every year on the night of November 21st, the people of Remnant gather together all across the world: around dinner tables and campfires, in pubs and parks and graveyards, swapping sightings and sharing stories, laughing and singing and celebrating,

Over time, their names change, their numbers vary, and their abilities are altered to suit the dramatism of the storyteller; sometimes evil is in the shape of a man with red hair, and sometimes it’s a horde of Grimm with their teeth barred. Sometimes evil creeps into their families, who exchange their children for favors from a witch. Sometimes evil is inside of them.

What’s always the same, though, is love. _For her mother,_ some say. _She couldn’t kill her sister,_ a few others whisper passionately. _Her girlfriend broke the knife_. 

They couldn’t go through with it because without one of them, there may as well be none. 

_Oh, but the lovers_ ; these are Blake’s favorite stories: _the lovers who fate never forgot. The lovers who touched so many we consider it a gift to tell their story. A privilege. An honor. And do you know why?_

Why?

_Because when we love someone, we want them to be immortal. And when we tell their story, well - it’s almost like they are._

Every year on November 21st, eight people meet at a broken stone and a blooming tree to commemorate the day they survived it. They bring their families and their children, and they catch up on time they’ve missed; how was the anniversary, congratulations on the PhD; oh, here’s the invitation to the wedding.

Every year on November 21st, eight people reunite only for celebration. 

And their legend lives on.


End file.
